Ким Робинсон - The Ministry for the Future

Earth was big. At this height, at this speed, that immensity was becoming clearer and clearer. Of course scale was so variable. Pale blue dot, mote of dust in the sunlight, true enough; but from this vantage it was beyond enormous. You could walk your whole life and never cover more than a small fraction of it. Now they lofted like an eagle over it.

“We’re so stupid,” she said to Art one night.

He looked at her, startled. It was late, they were alone in the viewing room, the others had gone to bed. This had already happened once or twice before; it was beginning to look like a habit, a little conspiracy to chat.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Sure you do,” she replied. “Why else are you up here?”

Again he was startled. His other guests didn’t speak to him like this, she saw.

“Didn’t something drive you up here?” she pressed.

“Oh,” he said, “let’s not talk about that.”

She relented, feeling she had gone too fast, hit a wall. “You like the beauty,” she said. “I know. And it is beautiful.”

“It is,” he agreed quickly. “I never get over it.”

She smiled. “You’re lucky.”

“It’s true.” And he added: “Especially tonight.”

She laughed at that.

He was still young enough to blush. She knew that kind of fair skin very well; her grandmother had blushed furiously right into her nineties.

After that conversation, the habit was set. They stayed for a nightcap in the viewing chamber after the others had retired. There they had the view of everything below. When he dimmed the room lights, the world below them became visible. This was especially true when the moon was up; then the land and ocean became eldritch things, glittery and dark, distinct in their forms.

The airship also had a tiny viewing chamber on top of its big body, there among the solar panels, so that Art and his guests could see the stars when the moon was down. In its earliest phase, after the thin glowing crescent of the moon set, he took guests up through the body of the ship to this chamber to observe the starbowl. One night at new moon he led Mary up there after the others had retired. Milky Way low in the west, Orion climbing up over the eastern horizon, all of this very far from cities, and at five thousand feet, it was simply amazing how many stars they could see. It was a whole different sky, primal and alive. Art knew the constellations, and some of the stories behind them. He had a telescope in that bubble set with a tracking motor that kept it fixed wherever he aimed it, but on that night he left it alone. He taught Mary to see a galaxy visible to the naked eye, in the north near Cassiopeia.

But mostly they stayed in what he called the understudy, looking down at the Earth. As they flew down the Atlantic, over Iceland, then the Hebrides, then Ireland—this last part for her, and for him too, perhaps—then over the Bay of Biscay—they would say good night to everyone, then she would go to her cabin, go to the bathroom, change clothes perhaps, and slip down the private stairs he had taught her to find, using the key code he had taught her to use, back to the viewing room at the bow, now locked and empty, except for them.

One night they watched the Pillars of Hercules float by below them, framing the Strait of Gibraltar. The little lumps of Gibraltar Rock and Jebel Musa stood like sentinels over the black water. Art told Mary the story of the flooding of the Mediterranean; it had been a dry low plain between Europe and Africa, then as an ice age had ended and sea level rose, the Atlantic had spilled through this strait into what had been flat playas. Two years of flow, he said, at a thousand times the rate of the Amazon, moving at forty meters a second, and carving a channel a thousand feet deep, until the Med was filled and the two bodies of water equalized in elevation.

“When did that happen?”

“About five million years ago, they say. There isn’t total agreement.”

“There never is.”

She watched him closely. A flood, a sudden breakthrough. Now he was talking about the end of the last ice age, fifteen thousand years ago, when enormous lakes of meltwater on top of the great ice sheet had broken through ice dams and poured down into the ocean in stupendous floods, changing the climate of the whole world. Then the Mediterranean had risen high enough to flood through the hills of the Bosporus, filling the Black Sea’s area in just a few years’ time, flooding land that had been occupied by humans, giving rise to the legend of Noah’s flood.

He was nattering on. He was perhaps a little nervous. Was he a dry plain himself, she wondered, a space waiting to be flooded? Was she the Atlantic, he the Mediterranean? And she? Was she rising? Would she pour over into him and fill him up?

There was no way to know, no rush to decide. They were headed for Antarctica, and they hadn’t even reached the equator yet. There was time. She could enjoy the idea of it, mull it over in mind and body. When she got up to go to her cabin, at the end of that night, she leaned over and gave him a quick kiss on the top of the head.

Across the Atlas Mountains, east over the Sahel. Here there were new salt lakes and marshes being created by water pumped up from the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. Salt seas in dry basins, an interesting experiment. They definitely changed things. Here in the Sahel, the dust storms that used to fly off these desert basins over the Atlantic were much diminished, and certain kinds of plankton out to sea were going hungry. Unexpected consequences—no, unforeseen consequences. Because now they were expected, even when they couldn’t be predicted.

For now, the desert below them was dotted by long lakes. Green, brown, sky blue, cobalt. Cat’s paws. Little towns hugged their shores, or stood on outcrops nearby. Irrigated fields formed circles on the land, circles of green and yellow like quilting art. Local culture was said to be thriving, Art said. Polls indicated most residents loved their new lakes, especially younger people. Without them we would have left, they said. The land was dying, the world had killed it. Now it would live.

A red dawn, punctuated by two black masses rising up higher than they were: Ethiopian highlands to their left, Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro to their right. As they flew through this immense gap, Art told them about Jules Verne’s first hit novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon . Also about his later works The Mysterious Island and The Clipper of the Clouds , both describing balloon and airship travels, as did of course a big part of Around the World in Eighty Days . Art also told them about Verne’s Invasion of the Sea , which told the story of pumping seawater onto Saharan deserts to create lakes, just as they had seen during the previous few days. Verne’s books had bewitched him as a youth, he said. An idea of how to live. He had taught himself French in order to read them in the original, said that Verne’s prose was far better than people usually supposed when judging by the wretched early translations.

“And so we’re here,” one of them said, “with our own Captain Nemo!”

“Yes,” Art replied easily. “But without his brooding, or so I hope.” This said with a lightning glance Mary’s way. “I hope I’m more like Passepartout. Passing by all, you know, with the least amount of difficulty.”

The green and gray masses of Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro loomed over them to the south, one very flat-topped, the other a little flat-topped. Neither had glaciers, nor any sign of snow. No such thing as the snows of Kilimanjaro. Something they could only hope for in distant times to come.

But the great plains of east Africa were still populated by animals. Yes, they were now doing a safari from the air. Elephants, giraffes, antelopes, great herds of all these, migrating from river to river. Some of the streams’ water was now piped in, Art said quietly. Desalinated at the seashore and then piped up to the headwaters and released to keep the streams flowing, the herds alive. They were in their twelfth straight year of drought.