Ким Робинсон: The Ministry for the Future

A thick talcum of light hung over the water. He went to the curving concrete road that bordered the lake on this side, crouched and stuck his arm in up to the elbow. It was indeed as warm as a bath, or almost. He kept his arm in, trying to decide if the water was cooler or hotter than his body. In the cooking air it was hard to tell. After a time he concluded the water at the surface was approximately the same temperature as his blood. Which meant it was considerably cooler than the air. But if it was a little warmer than body temperature… well, it would still be cooler than the air. It was strangely hard to tell. He looked at the people in the lake. Only a narrow stretch of water was still in the morning shade of buildings and trees, and that stretch would be gone soon. After that the entire lake would be lying there in the sun, until the late afternoon brought shadows on the other side. That was bad. Umbrellas, though; everyone had an umbrella. It was an open question how many of the townspeople could fit in the lake. Not enough. It was said the town’s population was two hundred thousand. Surrounded by fields and small hills, other towns a few or several kilometers away, in every direction. An ancient arrangement.

He went back to the compound, into the clinic on the ground floor. Up to his room on the next floor, huffing and puffing. It would be easiest to lie there and wait it out. He tapped in the combination on his safe and pulled open its door, took out the satellite phone. He turned it on. Battery fully charged.

He called headquarters in Delhi. “We need help,” he said to the woman who answered. “The power has gone out.”

“Power is out here too,” Preeti said. “It’s out everywhere.”

“Everywhere?”

“Most of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bengal. Parts of the west too, in Gujarat, Rajasthan…”

“What should we do?”

“Wait for help.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the forecast?”

“The heat wave is supposed to last awhile longer. The rising air over the land might pull in cooler air off the ocean.”

“When?”

“No one knows. The high pressure cell is huge. It’s caught against the Himalaya.”

“Is it better to be in water than in air?”

“Sure. If it’s cooler than body temperature.”

He turned off the phone, returned it to the safe. He checked the particulate meter on the wall: 1300 ppm. This for fine particulates, 25 nanometers and smaller. He went out onto the street again, staying in the shade of buildings. Everyone was doing that; no one stood in the sun now. Gray air lay on the town like smoke. It was too hot to have a smell, there was just a scorched sensation, a smell like heat itself, like flame.

He returned inside, went downstairs and opened the safe again, took out the keys to the closet, opened the closet and pulled out one of the generators and a jerrycan of gas. He tried to fill the generator’s gas tank and found it was already full. He put the can of gas back in the closet, took the generator to the corner of the room where the window with the air conditioner was. The windowbox A/C had a short cord and was plugged into the wall socket under the window. But it wouldn’t do to run a generator in a room, because of the exhaust. But it also wouldn’t do to run the generator out on the street below the window; it would surely be snatched. People were desperate. So… He went back to the closet, rooted around, found an extension cord. Up to the building’s roof, which had a patio surrounded by a rampart and was four floors off the street. Extension cord only reached down to the floor below it. He went down and took the A/C unit out of the window on the second floor, hefted it up the stairs, gasping and sweating. For a moment he felt faint, then sweat stung his eyes and a surge of energy coursed through him. He opened the fourth-floor office window, got the A/C unit balanced on the ledge and closed the window on it, pulled out the plastic sidepanels that closed off the parts of the window still open. Up to the rooftop terrace, start the generator, listen to it choke and rattle up to its two-stroke percussion. Initial puff of smoke, after that its exhaust wasn’t visible. It was loud though, people would hear it. He could hear others around the town. Plug in the extension cord, down the stairs to the upper office, plug in the A/C unit, turn it on. Grating hum of the A/C. Inrush of air, ah God, the unit wasn’t working. No, it was. Lowering the temperature of the outer air by 10 or 20 degrees—that left it at about 85 degrees as he thought of it, maybe more. In the shade that was fine, people could do that, even with the humidity. Just rest and be easy. And the cooler air would fall down the stairs and fill the whole place.

Downstairs he tried to close the window where the A/C unit had been, found it was stuck. He slammed it downward with his fists, almost breaking the glass. Finally it gave a jerk and came down. Out onto the street, closing the door. Off to the nearest school. A little shop nearby sold food and drinks to students and their parents. The school was closed, the shop too, but people were there, and he recognized some. “I’ve got air conditioning going at the clinic,” he said to them. “Come on over.”

Silently a group followed him. Seven or eight families, including the shop owners, locking their door after them. They tried to stay in the shade but now there was little shade to find. Men preceded wives who herded children and tried to induce their single file to stay in the shade. Conversations were in Awadhi, Frank thought, or Bhojpuri. He only spoke a little Hindi, as they knew; they would speak in that language to him if they wanted to talk to him, or confer with someone who would speak to him in English. He had never gotten used to trying to help people he couldn’t talk to. Embarrassed, ashamed, he blasted past his reluctance to reveal his bad Hindi and asked them how they felt, where their families were, whether they had anyplace they could go. If indeed he had said those things. They looked at him curiously.

At the clinic he opened up and people filed in. Without instruction they went upstairs to the room where the A/C was running, sat down on the floor. Quickly the room was full. He went back downstairs and stood outside the door and welcomed people in if they showed any interest. Soon the whole building was as full as it could be. After that he locked the door.

People sat sweltering in the relative cool of the rooms. Frank checked the desk computer; temperature on the ground floor 38 degrees. Perhaps cooler in the room with the A/C unit. Humidity now 60 percent. Bad to have both high heat and high humidity, unusual; in the dry season on the Gangetic plain, January through March, it was cooler and drier; then it grew hot, but was still dry; then with the soaking of the monsoon came cooler temperatures, and omnipresent clouds that gave relief from direct sunlight. This heat wave was different. Cloudless heat and yet high humidity. A terrible combination.

The clinic had two bathrooms. At some point the toilets stopped working. Presumably the sewers led to a wastewater treatment plant somewhere that ran on electricity, of course, and might not have the generator capacity to keep working, although that was hard to believe. Anyway it had happened. Now Frank let people out as needed so they could go in the alleys somewhere, as in hill villages in Nepal where there were no toilets at any time. He had been shocked the first time he saw that. Now he took nothing for granted.

Sometimes people began crying and little crowds surrounded them; elders in distress, little children in distress. Quite a few accidents of excretion. He put buckets in the bathrooms and when they were full he took them out into the streets and poured them into the gutters, took them back. An old man died; Frank helped some younger men carry the body up to the rooftop patio, where they wrapped the old one in a thin sheet, maybe a sari. Much worse came later that night, when they did the same thing for an infant. Everyone in every room cried as they carried the little body up to the roof. Frank saw the generator was running out of gas and went down to the closet and got the fuel can and refilled it.

Читать дальше