Ким Робинсон - The Ministry for the Future

A couple of their hosts stayed out with her and walked her to a pump, which stood inside a little heated hut of its own. Not very heated, as the floor inside was ice, with the black housing of the pump plunging right into it. The saving of civilization, right there before her. A piece of plumbing.

They went back outside and followed one of the pipelines up a gentle gradient. It stretched across the land from black box to black box, lying right on the ice. Mary stopped to look around. The snow seemed to her like a lake surface that had flash-frozen, all its little waves caught mid-break. Glowing in the light. Her guides explained things to her. She liked their enthusiasm. They were happy to be here not because they were saving the world, but because they were in Antarctica. If you like it, one told her when she asked, you like it a lot. It gets into you, until nowhere else seems as good.

A white plane under a blue dome. Some cirrus clouds over them looked close enough to touch.

“It’s like another planet,” Mary said.

Yes, they said. But actually just Earth.

“Thank you,” she said to them. “Now I’m ready to go back. I’m glad to have seen this, it’s just amazing. Thank you for showing it to me. But now let’s go back.”

Because I too have a place I love.

They flew north up the Atlantic, to see St. Helena and Ascension. Before Art dropped Mary off in Lisbon, where she would train home, she joined him in his understudy one last time. When they were sitting in their usual spots, sipping their drams, she said, “Will we meet again?”

He looked uncertain. “I hope so!”

She regarded him. A shy man. Some animals are reclusive.

“Why do you do this?” she said.

“I like it.”

“What do you do when you’re on the ground?”

“I resupply.”

“Aren’t there any places you like to walk around?”

He considered this. “I like Venice. And London. New York. Hong Kong, if it isn’t too hot.”

She stared at him for a while. He shifted his gaze down, clearly uncomfortable. Finally he said, “Mostly I just like being here. I like the sky people. The sky villages are a lot of fun to visit. I like the way they look. And the people in them. Everyone’s on a voyage. Did you ever read The Twenty-one Balloons ? It’s an old children’s book about a sky village.”

“Like your Jules Verne.”

“Yes, but for kids.”

Verne is for kids, Mary didn’t say.

“Anyway I read it when I was about five. Actually my mom read it to me.”

“Is your mom still alive?”

“No. She died five years ago.”

“Sorry to hear.”

“Is your mom still alive?”

“No. My parents both died young.”

They sat there for a while. Mary saw that he was unsettled. Rejecting all the fashionable diagnostics of their time, knowing him to be fond of her, maybe, she pondered it. So, he was quiet. Perhaps he was shy. Perhaps he played a part for people: Captain Art, doing his best to get by.

She was not quiet, nor was she shy. A bossy forward girl, one teacher had said of her at school; and that was true. So she could only guess at him. But this was always the case, with everyone. And it seemed to her they got along. His silence was restful. As if he were content. She wasn’t content, and she wasn’t sure she had ever met anyone who was, so it was a hard thing for her to recognize. Maybe she was wrong. No one was content. She was projecting onto his silence. But from what, and onto what? Oh it was all such a muddle, such a swamp of guesswork and feeling.

“I like you,” she said. “And you like me.”

“I do,” he said firmly, and then waved a hand, as if to push that aside. “I don’t mean to be intrusive.”

“Please,” Mary said. “I’m about to disembark here.”

“True.”

“And so?”

“And so what?”

Mary sighed. She was going to have to do the work here. “So—maybe we can meet again.”

“I’d like that.”

After a pause during which Mary watched him, making him go on, if he would, he said, “You could come with me again. Be my celebrity guide. We could make a tour of all the greatest landscape restoration sites, or geoengineering projects.”

“God spare me.”

He laughed. “Or whatever you like. Your favorite cities. You could be a guest curator or whatnot.”

“I’d rather just be your girlfriend.”

His eyebrows rose at that. As if it were an entirely new idea.

She sighed. “I’ll think about it. One nature cruise may be enough for me. But some ideas might come to me.”

He took a deep breath, held it, let it out in a long sigh. Now he looked really content. He glanced at her, met her eye, did not look away. Smiled.

“I always come back to Zurich. I have my room there.”

She nodded, thinking it over. Say it took years to get to know this man; what else did she have to do? “I’ll want you to talk a bit more than you have,” she warned him. “I’ll want to know things about you.”

“I’ll try,” he said. “I might have some things to say.”

She laughed at that, knocked back the whisky in her shot glass. It was late.

“Good,” she said. She stood and kissed him on the top of the head, ignoring his flinch away. “Maybe you can tell me when you’re in town, and we can get together. Fasnacht is at the end of the winter, that’s a party I like. We could do the town on Fasnacht.”

He frowned. “I’ll be out on another trip that month. I’m not sure I’ll be back by then.”

Mary stopped herself from sighing, from saying anything sharp. This was not going to be anything quick, or even normal. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. “Now I’m off to bed.”

Idon’t think anyone ever figured out who organized it. Whoever they were, they wanted to stay out of the way and have it look self-organized. Have it emerge out of the Zeitgeist. And maybe it did, I mean ultimately we all did do it together. It was already a feeling everyone had. I think something like three billion people tapped their phones to say they had taken part.

It was sort of like New Year’s Eve, except it was agreed it should be a simultaneous moment all over the Earth. Near the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere, like Narooz or Easter. Having it be the same very moment for all seemed right, it was important to feel the connection with everyone and everything else, as a kind of vibe. Kulike , in Hawaiian, means harmony. Or la ‘olu‘olu , harmony day. Evoke the noösphere, call it into existence by everyone thinking of it at the same time—that’s not a time-delayed thing, it has to be simultaneous. So we in Hawaii kind of got the short end of the stick, time-wise. The timing was presented as a given, which I think means that someone somewhere had to be doing it in terms of organization, but anyway east Asia got the late night, then going west they went down through the time zone hours until western Europe got noon, then across the Atlantic it got earlier and earlier across the Americas, to a dawn patrol kind of thing on the west coast, so we in Hawaii were looking at 3 AM I think it was. Fine, whatever, an excuse to stay up all night and party, and it has to be admitted that it was still nice and warm for us even in the middle of the night, so we could go to Diamond Head and look out over the ocean as we partied. And the moon was full that night, no coincidence I’m sure. So it was nice. Down in the concert bowl bands played through the night, and we sat on the ridge talking and drinking and watching the ocean by moonlight, good south swell too, so that a lot of us were talking about going to Point Panic at sun-up to catch some waves, great way to finish this event, back in Mother Ocean where we all began. Slight offshore wind too.