Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“But, you know, it’s not me who’s the throwback,” he said mischievously. “It’s the pols and bureaucrats I have to deal with who have some serious evolving to do.”

Even Shelley smiled at that.

Once we were over the Mojave we flew a circuitous route that took us over more of EI’s pet projects, set up on a demonstration scale across the face of the desert. There were windmill-like factories lined up in a row; Makaay said these were designed to strip the wind of carbon dioxide by passing it over absorbing chemicals, such as calcium hydroxide. Then, following the line of a canal, an arrow-straight lane of blue cut into the desert, we flew over patches of green fields and forests, all neatly squared off and contained. I learned later that this was a land-based analog of the plankton bloom we’d seen in the ocean; these virulently green grasses, shrubs, and trees were gen-enged to soak up a lot more carbon dioxide than their wild, unmodified ancestors. The key, it seemed, was to enhance the lignin content.

The most impressive constructions were domes, each coated in a filmy coat of geodesic silver, sitting in patient rows like vast golf balls. More carbon sequestration, Makaay said. The principle here was simple: just to freeze carbon dioxide out of the air, thousands of tons at a time, and then coat it in an insulating cladding — and, well, just leave it sitting there in the desert. “Hardly attractive, but it works,” he said.

Shelley argued with VR Makaay about the practicalities. Running a vast refrigeration plant to freeze down all that carbon dioxide was itself going to inject more heat into the atmosphere, wasn’t it? Yes, but if you took a longer view, over a decade or more, the net effect was a reduction of the atmosphere’s heat load through removal of the greenhouse gas. And then, no matter how efficient your insulation there would always be some leakage, wouldn’t there? So in the end you weren’t actually removing the carbon from the air but just adding a time lag. Yes, admitted Makaay, but this was a simple method to apply large-scale, and at least you were buying some time while you figured out a better solution…

I switched out of the conversation. As we dipped over one of those domes I could see the plane’s reflection, a moth that slid across a curving face of sky blue.

We had all fallen into a skeptical habit of mind, I thought, even Shelley, perhaps even myself. Geoengineering solutions always tended to brush over the complexity of the real world, notably the tangled intricacy of the biosphere — and so it was easier to do nothing than to do something big and risk making things worse. But Shelley and I were here to ask for help with some macro-engineering of our own, on a scale that would make these silver-clad golf balls look like toys.

Before it began its landing approach the plane banked, to head into the wind from the coast. Briefly we left the EI facility behind, and looped over an arid landscape populated by nothing but scrub and Joshua trees.

And suddenly the ground blazed with reflected light. I made out cars, neatly parked, a carpet of glass and brightly painted metal. They looked perfect, intact and unmarked, row upon row of them.

After the Amin policy announcements that had effectively robbed the gasoline automobile industry of its future, there had been years of adjustment and bailout. In Detroit and other motor cities the assembly lines had continued to roll like a tap nobody could turn off, pumping out vehicles for which there was no longer a market. The federal government had simply bought up the excess stock and shipped them to such places as this. And here these exquisitely engineered vehicles sat, rust-free in the dry air, as if in expectation that the great smog-choked days of the twentieth century might somehow return once more. Some of the later models were very smart, I knew, smart enough to be self-aware. I wondered if they knew where they were, if they were waiting like abandoned pets for owners that never came.

We emerged from the plane into a flat blistering heat; it was worse than Seville. I was even more impressed that EI had managed to turn bits of this desert green.

Ruud Makaay met us in person at the foot of the airplane steps. He seemed oddly bigger than his VR representation, and his handshake was firm.

EI’s buildings, at the edge of the smart tarmac of the small airfield’s runway, were just boxy white blocks, unimpressive. They were air-conditioned, though, and we stepped indoors with relief. Makaay led us through what looked like a regular office environment, an open-plan clutter of partitions and desks and people working at softscreens and terminals of various kinds. Most of them seemed to be here in the flesh, though one or two had the fake sheen of VRs.

“Your place is smaller than I expected,” I ventured.

“Well, this is only the head office,” Makaay said. “Corporate HQ. We have design facilities, labs, manufacturing plants all over the country — all over the world, in fact. And we kept this place low-key by design. We didn’t want to make the mistake of having our visitors distracted by the place itself, by fountains and pot-plants and statues of the founder. Have you even been to St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London? The tomb of Wren, the architect, has a Latin epitaph: ‘Visitor, if you seek my monument, look around you.’ Something like that. It’s the same with us. We want to make sure that what’s out the window is more interesting than what’s in here.”

He brought us to a small office. We sat; Makaay poured us both coffee.

“So,” I said, “do you think you’ll be able to help us?”

“Too early to say. Your proposal’s a little thin right now,” he said dryly. “But we’ll get to that. However, now you’ve seen something of us, what do you think — do we look as if we can make your project fly?”

I thought that over. “You’re certainly bigger than I expected. Wealthier.”

“Actually I wouldn’t say so.” He frowned. “We’re not rich yet, not given the size of the operation we run. It’s just that we play big. Everybody is surprised we have achieved any success at all, however. I think we have all got locked into a mind-set that says there is no way to make money in this contracting world of ours.

“Look at it from the point of view of an industrialist in, say, 2020. The shift to hydrogen, the need for new power generation systems, the dislocation of getting rid of the automobile — even if you could get your head around such vast changes, you didn’t have the infrastructure in place, the raw materials, the patents to exploit them; you didn’t have things sewn up the way your daddy used to. So it was better to resist change, to keep your head down, hoping it would all go away, or at least hope the storm wouldn’t break until you had finished your own career.

“It was Amin’s administration that changed all that.” He smiled fondly. “I was in business school at the time, at Harvard. Amin’s policies laid the foundation of new growth industries, in bio-infrastructure, compensation, environmental mitigation. There was money to be made in saving the world! When people realized that you saw a flurry of patents to protect technologies that were going to be key in the new political, legislative, and economic environment. At Harvard our instructors told us we were privileged to be living through a shifting in the economic paradigm, perhaps the most profound since the Industrial Revolution. And people started to get rich.”

“Like EI,” Shelley said.

“Look, this company has greened an area of the Sahara the size of Texas. You only need to siphon off a little of the proceeds from such an enterprise to bring in some major sums. But it’s nothing to what we could be achieving, I believe.”