by Brian Stableford
* * * *
Brian Stableford’s recent novels include Sherlock Holmes and the Vampires of Eternity (Black Coat Press) and The Moment of Truth (Borgo Press). Recent non-fiction includes The Devil’s Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse (Borgo Press). He is making good progress with his project translating the major works of early French scientific romance; five volumes featuring all the relevant work of Maurice Renard will appear in the early months of 2010 and a further five collecting work by J.H. Rosny later in the year. In his newest story for us, Brian turns away from the past to imagine the future. We know that a warming Earth may present us with a world of difficulties, but then again...
“Gaia likes it cold.”—James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia
Gerda Rosenhane fell in love with Kelemen Kiss—who did not like his forename and insisted on being called Kay—at the age of six, and somehow avoided ever falling out, in spite of all the customary childish quarrels and jealousies, adolescent metamorphoses and adult shifts in perspective. She was able to fall in love with him in the first place, and to sustain their relationship for many years thereafter, because they spent their childhood living on the same street in Strasbourg, within walking distance of the European Parliament.
The resilience of their relationship was greatly aided by the fact that Gerda and Kay had the same birthday, March twelfth; they always celebrated it together as children, thus founding a tradition that extended far into adulthood.
Under other circumstances, the cultural differences between Gerda, who was Swedish, and Kay, who was Hungarian, might have been immense, but they not only lived on the same street, they attended the same school: the so-called New International School, whose pupils came from the assorted nations of the EC, but where all the classes were taught in English. Everything in their world tended to be prefaced with the label “New,” even though the practice was getting rather old. As beneficiaries or victims of New Internationalism, however, they were certainly united in their cultural affiliations in a way that even their immediate families did not entirely understand.
Another circumstance that helped Gerda and Kay find common cause in their early days was that they only had one parent each, and that the parents in question, busy about the ever-problematic business of running Europe, were almost entirely absent from their quotidian lives. Gerda’s father, an EC bureaucrat, had died on a fact-finding trip to the vanishing Arctic ice cap before her second birthday, a victim of the treacherously melting ice; Kay’s mother—a much-married woman—had resumed her briefly interrupted career as a celebrity model as soon as she had recovered her figure after the relevant divorce, which was finalized not long after her pregnancy came to term.
At six, Gerda believed, with an innocently boundless conviction of which only six-year-olds are normally capable, that Kay was her other half—or, because she had a precocious love of language, her “inevitable counterpart.” They did, in fact, look uncannily alike, apart from the fact that Gerda was very pale of complexion, blonde and blue-eyed, while Kay was dark, black-haired and brown-eyed. “Like opposing pawns on a chessboard,” Gerda’s mother once observed, rather unkindly—quickly adding, for the sake of kindness, even though it wrecked the analogy: “But one day, when you’re grown up, you’ll be a queen.”
Even at the age of six, Gerda had been able to reply, “I can’t, Mommy. We live in a democracy.”
When Gerda and Kay started at the NIS, the fact that all its classes were taught in English was only mildly controversial, but by the time they reached their final year it had become a running sore of angry contention. This was not because anything had happened in the meantime to the ever-dubious reputation of the United Kingdom, which was still the Crazy Man of Europe, but because it was universally recognized that the NIS practice of offering classes in English had nothing to do with far-from-merry England and everything to do with an “American cultural hegemony” that was supposed to have died in the first half of the twenty-first century, and whose inertial persistence within the World Wide Web generated a good deal of World Wide Resentment. Pragmatism insisted, however, that if any language were ever to get the children of Europe’s elite talking like a true community, English was the only possible candidate, so English survived while “American cultural hegemony” became effectively synonymous, on European lips, with “the poisonous ideas that got us into this unholy mess.”
The unholy mess in question was, of course, the CC. Hardly anyone called it the Carbon Crisis any more, as if merely spelling out its name might somehow make the catastrophe worse. Indeed, such were the mysterious ways in which euphemism operated, that it was often re-expanded, with calculated absurdity, as “the Cubic Centimeter”—except in England, where the cultural significance of the letters CC was as farcically out of step with the rest of Europe as everything else. There, the unholy mess was routinely referred to, in a similar spirit of perverse flippancy, as the Cricket Club, even though—as the smart kids at the NIS were fond of pointing out, in order to demonstrate that the Second Great Depression hadn’t entirely robbed the world of its sense of humor—the only things England had that remotely resembled crickets were itsy-bitsy grasshoppers, which no one ever hunted with clubs, or even packs of hounds.
Long before she came to the end of her schooldays, Gerda had grown used to thinking of her relationship with Kay as an unholy mess, but it wasn’t the same kind of unholy mess as the CC, even though the CC had already become tangled up in it. The CC was all about unwelcome overheating, but Gerda’s love for Kay had never had a chance to overheat, because Kay had never given it a chance to do so. When Gerda first confessed to Kay that he was her other half, her inevitable counterpart, he agreed, but his casual manner made it obvious that he didn’t really understand. It soon became painfully clear to Gerda that he understood the analogy in a very different way. He thought that they were like non-identical twins: that his idea of “inevitability” was that they were and would always remain pseudo-siblings, as close as close could be but in an inviolably non-erotic sense. As time passed, although his sexual indifference never became a hostile jet of ice-cold water chilling the force of her emotion, it definitely functioned as a frustrating gust of carbon dioxide, warm enough in its fashion but fatal to wholehearted flamboyance.
Because she continued stubbornly to yearn for him, in a pathetically desperate fashion, Gerda grudgingly accepted and adapted to Kay’s insistence on thinking of her as a sister. By slow degrees, as she passed through puberty and matured into an adult, she even managed to half-convince herself that perhaps it was for the best; romance was, after all, an obsolete twentieth century delusion born of a world careless of the deadly Cubic Centimeter, blithely unconscious of the holocaust to come. She, as an apostle of New Internationalism, owed her first and greatest dedication to whatever part she might be able to play in the Great Crusade for the Salvation of Civilization.
There were, of course, many parts available in that great drama, which was an end that lent itself to many means, but Gerda and Kay were MEP kids in an era when European politics was proudly recovering the old dynastic dimensions that it had briefly forsaken in the twentieth century. There was a tacit expectation in the NIS that the best of its students would become the MEPs and EC bureaucrats of the future, and that all other vocations were second-rate. Kay was never in any doubt that he would follow in his father’s footsteps, but Gerda was not at all sure that she wanted to follow in her mother’s. This was not because of any difference in the quality of the role models that Miklos Kiss and Selma Rosenhane provided, but did have something to do with the fact that they were routinely opposed in key debates, Miklos being an orthodox Gaian utterly dedicated to the war against global warming, while Selma represented a constituency that had seen significant local benefits from the shift in climate and was not at all averse to keeping them, in spite of the nasty problems that were being caused elsewhere.
While Gerda and Kay were children, their parents flew home on a regular basis to visit their constituencies—Selma Rosenhane to Kiruna, Miklos Kiss to Szeged—but the need to maintain the continuity of their NIS schooling and conserve their NIS-based social lives meant that the only times Gerda ever saw Sweden and Kay saw Hungary were during the long summer vacations. There was a sense in which they both felt even closer to the beating heart of EC politics than their parents did, but that sense of closeness affected them differently. The fact that it was his father who currently had a seat in the chamber never seemed to Kay to be anything more than a mere technicality, and Kay lived in the expectation not only of one day stepping into his father’s shoes but also of finding them a perfect fit. Gerda, on the other hand, was not so sure that her mother’s shoes were the correct size, or the most apt design; in particular, she was not sure that her mother was sufficiently passionate in the cause she represented.
Kay and Gerda remained united, however, in the conviction that they had been born with a mission to change the world, and that their schooling constituted an intense training-program that would allow them to carry their mission through. The Strasbourg chamber was still afflicted by the Curse of the Thousand-and-One Interpreters, but in the corridors of the NIS there was no need for such barriers to understanding. Even the six-year-olds there knew that they were the future in embryo, whose responsibility it would be to steer the New Old World through the climatic ravages of the CC. Such subsidiary tasks as defending the EC against the economic ravages of the New New World of Asian Slow Developers—whose brief days as Asian Rapid Developers had recently run into the bumpers at the end of the Great Historical Track—were also on the agenda, but the focal point of all their hopes, fears, and endeavors was the Cubic Centimeter.
* * * *
Kay was a trifle envious of Gerda’s summer holidays in the Far North, not because they took her away from him for weeks on end—which always left her own heart more than a trifle desolate—but because they gave Gerda an opportunity to see snow. The snow in question was not, admittedly, in her immediate vicinity, but on the as-yet-undefrosted mountaintops that formed Kiruna’s western horizon. Snow was snow, though, and everyone knew that it was soon to become extinct, except in Antarctica, where the colossal mass of the great ice-sheet was not yet in a tearing hurry to be gone. Snow was symbolic of Gaia’s ongoing decline; it was her favorite dress, and all true Gaians loved it. Gerda had never known the ravages that snow and ice could inflict on populations for whom winter was Hell, but she nevertheless contrived, during her summers in Kiruna, to absorb something of the traditional local terror. She never liked snow herself, and became impatient with Kay’s reverence.
“Green is supposed to be Gaia’s color,” she told Kay ostentatiously when they came together again after the summer that divided the Elementary and Secondary sectors of their NIS education. “There’s plenty of green in Kiruna nowadays. The New Agricultural Revolution is just as spectacular in Sweden as it is in Greenland and Siberia. Nobody there wants the old winters back.”
“Szeged may not be the hell on Earth that Southern Italy and Spain have become,” Kay retorted, dutifully reciting the Gaian party line, “but it’s still bearing the cost of your New Agricultural Revolution. I know that your population’s expanding as people from the drowned coasts are relocated, but it’s tiny by comparison with the numbers whose livelihoods have been wrecked. We live in a democracy, remember. Anyway, I hate spending summers in Szeged. My great-great-great-grandfather should never have moved from the mountains to the city. It’s still tolerable up there, even in July—so they say.”
Everyone in the International School was an expert in European geography by the age of eleven, and most of the pupils were fairly well up in European history, in spite of its appalling intricacies, so Gerda was able to reply: “But the mountains that your ancestors came from are in Rumania now. If your ancestors had stayed where they were, your father wouldn’t be a Hungarian MEP. He’d be a tourist guide showing crazy English people around one of Count Dracula’s alleged castles.”
“The real Dragulya was a Magyar, and therefore quintessentially Hungarian,” Kay pointed out, attempting to claim the intellectual high ground, as he always did before going on to state the obvious. “Anyway, he’d be a Rumanian MEP instead. He was a born politician. Everybody says so.”
Even at eleven, Gerda knew that Kay’s arguments carried real weight. The Greenlanders, Laplanders, Siberians, and Kamchatkans were tiny in number by comparison with the southern Europeans who had been displaced by rising sea levels or seen their agricultural bases shrivel beneath the effects of devastating heat waves and violent storms. Even the Siberian Oligarchs paid lip service to Gaian ideals, like ancient would-be saints crying “Lord, give me chastity—but please, not yet!” Even so, it never occurred to her to modify her gathering political convictions simply because Kay, whom she loved so desperately, did not share them.
Much later in life, Gerda came to suspect that the peculiar dynamics of their personal relationship might have intensified their political opposition. She suspected, too, that the true—subconscious—reason for Kay’s failure to understand that her beliefs were correct, while his were seriously misled, was his refusal to admit that he really was her other half, her inevitable counterpart. Even while they were still at school, she could not help believing that there was a sense in which Kay could not really believe what he claimed to believe, but must be a victim of delusion, of some strange arcane spell cast upon him by an inability to connect with or comprehend the wisdom of his heart.
Although Kay claimed, as all committed Gaians did, that his ambition to reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was purely based in reason and utilitarian calculation, Gerda came to suspect, even before she completed her education, that it was really based in unthinking idolatry, and that in worshiping Gaia, he and the rest of the vast democratic majority that he aspired to represent were merely cherishing the chains of an ancient bondage.
Gerda, on the other hand, became firmly convinced that the world needed a new Mother, if it needed a Mother at all—and her conviction of that was as firm as her love for Kay. Her love for her own mother was just as firm, but it was increasingly infected with a conviction that Selma Rosenhane was a member of the opposition for all the wrong reasons. Had Selma been born in Szeged, like Miklos Kiss, she would have been a committed Gaian, because that would have been the obvious way to gather votes and the most useful source of profitable alliances. Hungary was hardly in the front line of the CC, having no coastline and still being ten degrees north of the Creeping Tropic, but the only pro-change nation with which it had a border was Ukraine, which was only pro-change because it was in Russia’s pocket, and Moscow was now the hapless puppet of the Siberian Oligarchs.
Selma Rosenhane was no Laplander, ethnically speaking, but Lapland was her vote-cropping turf; her political allegiances and alliances were forged in the hinterlands of the Arctic Circle, on the shores of the New Blue Ocean, whose present shore-dwellers—especially the immigrant “converts” to whom it seemed a land of limitless opportunity—did not take kindly to the fact that the rest of the world had taken to calling it “the Methane A-Bomb” since the ice cap had disappeared and the waters had started soaking up the sunlight. Selma was, however, too canny a politician not to play the Gaian game; she not only paid lip service to the idea that the CC was a global disaster, but accepted it. Even in her own opinion, she was merely one of the worst of the vast multitude of bad Gaians who deplored the way the world was going but did not want to make the personal sacrifices required to return it to its old stability.
Gerda, by contrast, became an honest and devout anti-Gaian, who wanted to find a new stability rather than returning to the old one: a warmer, more passionate Earth Mother, who did not care to dress in snow and ice, who did not love a world that was cold and bleak. She admitted that the ecosphere might not be able to find a new stability unaided, but that was because the ecosphere was under Gaia’s dominion. If the ecosphere could not achieve a new stability unaided, Gerda thought, then it was up to humankind—a humankind intellectually and materially liberated from Gaia’s dominion—to discover and impose one. That would certainly require a more profound change in human behavior than a patchy migration from the Creeping Tropics to the New Temperate Zones—but who, in their right minds, could possibly believe that Gaia’s humankind was so perfect as not to require real and profound change?
* * * *
Kay did not seem to understand, at first, that Gerda was not simply following in her mother’s footsteps in taking up an anti-Gaian stance. When they both stood for election as Student President in their final year at the IS, thus coming into open conflict for the first time, Kay tried to take advantage of their mutual birthday party to persuade her not to do it—and, indeed, that the platform on which she intended to stand made her a traitor to her own people as well as the entire human race. It was, by coincidence, the first birthday party they had entirely to themselves, in one of Strasbourg’s most carefully air-conditioned restaurants—an indulgence for which Selma Rosenhane and Miklos Kiss had grudgingly agreed to pay the bill.
“Just because you’ve seen snow in the distance, my dear sister,” he said, sternly, “doesn’t mean that you’re a real northerner. You’re Strasbourg through and through. Your mother might have been sent here to give the barbarians a voice, but your mission in life ought to be to carry the good word in the other direction. It’s up to the children of the Arctic MEPs to explain to the up-and-coming generation why the fact that atmospheric warming might make Novaya Zemlya into the new Caribbean and turn Siberia into the world’s grain basket is not adequate compensation for the devastation of the Mediterranean, even if one only takes economic costs into account. We all have to be better Gaians now than we’ve contrived to be before—better practicing Gaians I mean—else the world is doomed. All opposition, wherever it’s based, lends dangerous support to the reckless and the gluttonous, encouraging them to continue their bad habits. Anyway, I’m bound to win—you’ll be humiliated.”
“The point, beloved,” Gerda riposted, affectionately, “is not to worship Gaia more devoutly, but to cast her idol down. She has held the world in icy thrall too long. Now that spring is here, the task at hand for humankind is not to preserve what vestiges of winter we can for as long as possible but to make proper preparations for glorious summer. And whether you win or not, and however large your majority might be, you’re backing the wrong horse. We’re the third or fourth generation that has battled with its conscience over carbon restraint, and people will soon be exhausted by the toils of the losing battle. Gaian politics is on the point of collapse; it’s only a matter of time before the balance tips and the opposition catches fire. All the true cause will need to bring about a revolution in ideas is a clever torch-bearer.”
“You?” he said, with an unintentional hint of a sneer that was a stab in the heart, not so much because it was a sneer as because it was so utterly casual.
“Maybe not,” she admitted. “But somebody with ideas similar to mine. The slogans that will win the future are ours. FREE THE CARBON. WAKE UP TO WARMTH. BIOMASS IS OPPORTUNITY. HEAT IS GOOD. GO WITH THE FLOW, NOT AGAINST IT. EVOLUTION, NOT DEVOLUTION. PROGRESS, NOT REGRESS. Shall I go on?”
“Do you really think the voters will go for that sort of crap?” he asked her bluntly, effortlessly coming all the way down from the intellectual high ground he had initially tried to occupy. “Here in Strasbourg I mean, not in the ex-frozen wastes of northern Sweden.”
“Maybe not,” she replied, “but a true statesman’s job is to change public opinion, not to reflect it. You might win this battle, by courtesy of historical inertia, but you can’t win the war. You can’t stop progress, and the CC really is progress, no matter how frightening it seems.”
“Frightening? It’s more than frightening, sister. It’s costing lives—billions of lives.”
“Everybody has one life, my love, and nobody loses it more than once. It’s Gaia’s world that can’t sustain the present population, and Gaia’s people who’ve produced it regardless. Maybe a better, warmer world can sustain a larger human population, and maybe it can’t—but there’s every chance that it will sustain a wiser population, because it will need a wiser population to create and sustain it.”
“You can’t dismiss the misery of billions of people with that kind of smart rhetoric.”
“And you shouldn’t try to sustain that misery with stupid rhetoric.”
It was at that point that the argument came close to spoiling the meal, and the birthday—which was something that neither of them wanted.
“Anyway, this student presidency thing is kids’ stuff,” Kay told Gerda, relenting his tone a little. “It’s a game. We won’t be going into battle until we actually graduate from uni—which is why you still have time to switch sides and join the White Knights. In real life, if not in proverbial wisdom, it’s the side that wins the battles that wins the war, and the Gaian majority is solid. It won’t disappear in our lifetimes unless the methane bomb goes off and the CC turns into the Venus Effect. School politics is only play-acting, but we’ll be embroiled in the real thing soon enough. Do you really want to be stuck in the struggling opposition? You don’t have to step into Selma’s shoes, flying the flag of prevarication for avaricious Eskimos and the Siberian Oligarchs—there are plenty of other things you might do. Your father was a bureaucrat, working on the day-to-day amelioration of the crisis, and there’ll always be more than enough to do in that direction. If you don’t want that, you could always work for me. We’ve always had a useful camaraderie, and every great front-man needs great back-up.”
“There’s a world of difference,” Gerda replied, sadly, “between being friends and being a team.” Because she was exactly the same height as he was, she was able to look him straight in the eye without any implicit disadvantage, and she knew full well that blue eyes were better equipped for staring, but she took the fact that he eventually looked away as solid evidence of the virtue of her cause.
Kay won the NIS presidential election hands down, just as he had predicted, but Gerda wasn’t unduly downhearted. The game had a long way to go before the final whistle. Kay might have put the first point on the board, but Gerda felt, passionately, that history and evolution really were on her side. As with all the other gods and goddesses that humankind had ever worshipped, the ideals that Gaia stood for were more honored in the breach than the observance. In Christendom, the meek had conspicuously failed to inherit the Earth, and even the loudest of Gaia’s preachers continued to breathe out more than their fair share of carbon dioxide, without ever managing to dampen civilization’s industrial flamboyance.
* * * *
Gerda and Kay never discussed the possibility of going on to the same university after leaving the NIS. Kay took it for granted that the tacit parting of their ways introduced into their lives by their increasing commitment to opposing political ideologies would extend to an actual parting of the ways, and Gerda accepted the assumption—but she was able to leave it to Kay to insist that they meet up at least once a year to celebrate their birthday.
“I’ll never give up hope of bringing you into the fold,” he told her. “I’ll keep on trying to win you over.”
“So will I,” she promised.
Even Kay, of course, could not step directly into his father’s shoes after university, mainly because his father was still wearing them and fully intended to go on doing so for another ten or twenty years. That was a normal situation for ex-IS students to be in, and the conventional career path of the school’s elite had to accommodate that period of delay. Most went to Brussels, which had clung on to the greater part of its bureaucratic functions when the legislative chamber had decamped, in order to serve as cogs in the administrative machine while they waited for power-charged slots to open up, and that was what Kay did. Gerda, on the other hand, decided to stay on at her own university—Bern—as a postgraduate researcher.
When she communicated this decision to Kay on their twenty-second birthday, during a meeting in Budapest, where he had taken his own degree, he was not at all surprised. He even seemed to take a certain satisfaction in her decision, as if he imagined that he could take some credit for it. Mistakenly—mistaking her motives had become second nature to him by now—he jumped to the conclusion that she was planning to abandon politics permanently, having realized the folly of setting up a campaign-tent outside the Gaian encampment.
“It’s a wise move,” he told her, smiling to demonstrate his good will. “Academic life is a safe haven, especially for ... what was the title of your course, again?”
Gerda knew that Kay had studied International Relations, as a good MEP kid should; he, on the other hand, only contrived to remember that she had not. “Practical Botany,” she reminded him.
“Right,” he said, putting on a show of vagueness. “I knew it sounded as if it had something to do with flowers, even though it was really about crop engineering. Good decision—plant engineering is hotter than ever. It’s not just a matter of tweaking staple crops to help them adapt to changing climatic conditions, is it? The necessity of compensation for insect decline has forced the engineers to be more adventurous. And it’s still the cutting edge of carbon sink technology, even if it hasn’t delivered yet.”
“Plant engineering is crucial to the world’s future,” Gerda agreed, as she had at least twice before, when Kay had condescended to make similar remarks on their previous birthday meetings. His affected vagueness was intended to assist him in maintaining the appearance of knowing where the intellectual high ground was, even though his ignorance of the intimate details of genetic engineering prevented him from operating there. It never worked, and Gerda always took a certain delight in watching him flounder as he tried to pretend that he knew and understood more than he did.
“I’ve heard good things about contemporary work on hemp and ... er ... those primitive trees that were among the first colonists of the land,” Kay said, blushing when he was momentarily unable to conjure up the second term.
“Cycads,” said Gerda, helpfully. “Gymnosperms that look like crosses between tree-ferns and palms. Very interesting to engineers because of their lack of attention to strict speciation.”
“Right,” said Kay. “Will you be doing anything with hemp or cycads?”
“As a matter of fact,” Gerda said, “I will.”
“Which?” was all that Kay was able to say by way of follow-up.
“A bit of both,” she said. “I’m not a frontline engineer, modifying small sets of genes to produce new strains of existing species. I’m more of a genomic designer—a strategist rather than a tactician. Making incremental improvements in the old staples is all very well, and there’s certainly a spur of urgency driving such work right now, but the process is too much like the early development of systemic computer code—or natural selection, for that matter. It’s just one quick fix after another, improvised patches gradually building up into nightmarishly confused strata. Somebody has to think on a bigger scale, and in a longer term.”
Kay obviously had little or no idea what she meant, but he wasn’t about to ask for enlightenment in any craven fashion. “At least you’ll be working for the cause,” he said. “The Heavy Metal brigade still favors engineering solutions to the problem of getting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turning the methane-bomb problem into an energy-producing opportunity, and they have industry’s inherited quadrillions behind them, but I’m all in favor of the natural approach. Gaia made trees to secure her own carbon balance, so that’s probably the wisest way to get back to twentieth century carbon dioxide levels, if we can only make the crucial breakthrough. That’s what the current work on hemp is all about, isn’t it?”
Gerda flashed him a broad smile, as she always did—without always being conscious of it—before she set out to lead him up the garden path. “Hemp’s old news,” she told him. “It’s a perfect carbon-sink crop, I suppose—it grows like wildfire, and every part of the crop is useful.”
Kay knew enough to amplify that. “The fibers have always been used to make rope,” he said, “but modern engineers have expanded their textile versatility marvelously. The woody shiv produces building materials—properly processed, the material is as strong as concrete. We’ve got several initiatives in hand to increase its use, although your mother’s friends keep making smart remarks about rebuilding the Kremlin, the Taj Mahal, the Vatican, and the White House out of matchsticks. Is that the sort of thing you’re working on?”
“No. Insofar as hemp figures in my genomic schemes, it’s the leaves that are the interesting part. We all know what sort of potential the leaves of Cannabis sativa have as brain-food.”
Kay furrowed his black eyebrows at that. “I thought the engineers were trying to take the psychotropics out of the leaves,” he said. “Even the industrial varieties that have been tweaked to make the leaves usable animal fodder only preserve a mild tranquilizing effect.”
“That’s the present situation,” Gerda agreed. “All of the research to date has focused on adapting the foliage as a foodstuff or a biofuel source—but that’s a bit wasteful, in my view. If we’ve got abundant potential already there for the production of cannabinols, why not exploit it? That’s where the wise money is going now. Give the world a better building material, and people will shake you by the hand; give them a better way to get high and they’ll love you forever.”
“I don’t know about that,” Kay said, dubiously—and accurately.
“If Gaia made trees to strike the right compositional balance in the atmosphere,” Gerda told him, carefully keeping a straight face, “she must have made psychotropics to strike the right compositional balance in the noesphere. She’s an all-round chill-out fan, after all.”
* * * *
After that exchange, Kay didn’t bother to ask about the cycads, any more than he probed any deeper to find out whether Gerda really had been converted to the Gaian cause—but the cycads were, in Gerda’s opinion, far more important than hemp to the cause of remaking the world. Hemp was a Gaian agent through and through: an old-school carbon sink that loved a relatively cool environment. If the newly fertile lands of northern Europe were to be planted with vast forests of genetically engineered hemp, the rains that fell on them would continue to be dutifully temperate, and the northward progress of the Creeping Tropic would be inhibited, even if it were not eventually reversed.
If Gaia were to be permanently toppled from her icy throne and replaced by a Mother with fire in her loins, in Gerda’s opinion, hemp could only be awarded a peripheral role in the deicidal army, perhaps as a sly double agent. A host of new cycads, on the other hand, might well provide shock troops capable of turning the battle into a rout.
For the moment, research on cycads, like research on many other species, was being driven by anxieties about the global decline of insect populations. People who thought botany had “something to do with flowers” considered flowering plants to be one of Gaia’s artistic masterstrokes, and were horrified by the thought that much of that beauty might be lost because many of the nasty insects that had long undertaken the duty of pollinating them were in danger of extinction. Flowering plants had, of course, been so outstandingly successful in the eternal war of natural selection precisely because insect pollination allowed them to range further and faster than plants relying on less agile and versatile pollination mechanisms. Where the insect-pollinated angiosperms had led, the sturdier varieties had been able to follow, including the fruit-producers that used evolutionary johnny-come-latelies like birds and mammals as seed-transmitters.
Now that the insects, birds, and mammals were all on the decline as rapid climate change took its punishing toll, the pressure on agriculturalists and genetic engineers to save the angiosperms had become intense, but the difficulty of the task was such that biotechnologists had been forced to examine the possibility of a bolder substitution, responding to a potential angiosperm die-back by introducing new and carefully enhanced models of the various kinds of plants that the angiosperms had replaced, especially the most ancient: tree-ferns and cycads. The primitive nature of their genomes gave them a certain precious flexibility, which more recent species had forsaken. Cycads, in particular, seemed remarkably amenable to exotic genetic augmentation, unusually hospitable to gene-complexes transplanted from very different species, including fungi and animals. They had never made much appeal to tactical engineers because they had few economically useful properties to be enhanced, but from the viewpoint of genomic strategists they were raw clay, which might be molded into anything at all by flesh-sculptors of genius.
Gerda knew that it was the versatility of specialized angiosperms, more than any other single factor, which had facilitated Gaia’s manifestation as the Snow Queen, cooling the Earth down from the much higher temperatures that had been normal when gymnosperms ruled the climate. Gerda was interested in cycads not because they might have the potential to take up slack as Gaia’s favorite carbon sinks ran into difficulties, but because they might have the potential to initiate a much more profound metamorphosis in the ecosphere. For the neo-cycads, Gerda thought, the imaginable might be only the beginning. The ultimate objective of human intelligence, as she saw it, was to roll back the horizons of the presently imaginable into the realms of the previously undreamed-of—and, for that, flesh-sculptors of genius would require the proper clay.
Gerda was perfectly well aware, of course, that humankind had been a casual byproduct of Gaia’s fondness for a cool throne. It was not so much that Homo sapiens was a mammal, designed to live in a cool environment—its ancestor-species had, after all, evolved in the tropics—but that its great leap forward, in evolutionary terms, had resulted from the sequence of Ice Ages in which Gaia had displayed her most recent wardrobe. It had been the domestication of fire—the foundation of all technology—that had allowed human beings to colonize almost the entire land surface of the globe, including such inhospitably cold regions as northern Sweden. Gerda was not prepared, however, to draw the conclusion from this intrinsic indebtedness that humankind was bound to remain Gaia’s slave forever, trying loyally with all its collective might to restore the world to the climate she liked best.
In Gerda’s view, such ecological conservatism could only lead to evolutionary petrifaction and an end to progress. If humankind were to continue to advance, it needed to evolve; to evolve, it needed new challenges, new pressures, and new opportunities.
Gaia had cooled the world down by putting carbon that had once been incorporated into living organisms into a whole series of inert deposits: coal and oil sealed up in geological strata, methane held in crystalline clathrates in permafrosts and on the sea bed. The cost of the ecosphere’s cooling had, in consequence, been a massive loss of biomass: biomass that had once been embodied in species that thrived in the heat, based in jungles and swamps that must have made angiosperm-dominated rainforests look like mere kitchen gardens by comparison. There had been no deserts in those days, when it really had never rained but it poured.
Unlike Kelemen Kiss and his pusillanimous majority, Gerda Rosenhane did not want to design new carbon sinks in order to calm the atmosphere down and make the Earth cool again. She wanted to design new carbon carriers, in order to liberate all the dead carbon from Gaia’s miserly hoards, to give it life again, and to restore the ecosphere to all its prodigal glory. She believed that humankind, armed with a sophisticated biotechnology, could not merely come through that transition but thrive on it, emerging stronger than before—and she also believed that if the species’ statesmen would only condescend to become constructive strategists instead of mere reactive tacticians, they ought to be able to take control of the metamorphosis and guide it.
Cycads were to be her secret weapon; they had lost their first battle against the angiosperms, but the war was not yet over. With the right scientific allies, there was every chance that they might be re-equipped to take full advantage of the trouble that the angiosperms had run into as their traditional pollinators died in droves. If they were to do so, however—if the world were to be fitted out with a new and enduring heat-loving ecosphere—they would need human foot-soldiers to clear their way. Gerda knew full well that the war would first have to be won in the political arena, and that was where she intended to fight when the time was ripe.
In Gaia’s cool world, however—in spite of the fact that it had now been in dire danger of becoming seriously uncool for the better part of a century—time, like fruits, did not ripen overnight.
* * * *
While Gerda labored patiently and unobtrusively in Bern, Kay’s career went from strength to strength. He inherited his father’s seat in the Strasbourg Parliament at thirty, became EC ambassador to Beijing at thirty-three, and at thirty-six was one of the key architects of the fifty-first Global Carbon Treaty—the first one, in the estimate of many cynical observers, that actually stood a slim chance of remaining unbroken for more than a decade. By the time he turned forty he was widely known as the Hemp King, not so much because he had made billions of euros investing in hemp biotechnology, planting, and processing, as by virtue of the fact that he had become such an enthusiastic propagandist for the existential benefits of neo-cannabinols.
When he met up with Gerda in Brussels for their private fortieth birthday celebration—he had such an elevated public profile that he had now to have an “official” one as well, although she did not—Kay was careful to give Gerda due thanks for this particular aspect of his success.
“You were absolutely right,” he told her. “Carbon sinks, polite handshakes; better highs, unconditional love.”
“Not unconditional,” she corrected him, blandly. “There’s no such thing as unconditional love in politics.”
“That’s true,” he admitted, “but the principle holds good. The utilitarian aspects of Gaia-worship will save the world, but the spiritual aspects help it to want to be saved. Good Gaians need to get their heads straight.”
“That’s a trifle glib too,” she pointed out. “Neo-cannabinols reduce appetites, in more ways than one. They enable people to be happy in consuming less and doing less, but that’s not really the spiritual aspect of Gaia-worship, is it?”
“You really have turned into a scientist, haven’t you?” he retorted. “Full marks for pedantry. Mind you, you were never the easiest person in the world to compliment. Perhaps I should content myself with simply saying thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” she said.
“Mind you,” he said, “we’re still running faster just to stay in the same place. The pace at which things are getting worse probably isn’t accelerating any more, but we’re going to need something new to help us turn the corner. The methane bomb hasn’t stopped ticking, and it has to be defused. If something were to trigger a massive clathrate-release, we’d really be sunk. You biotech wizards haven’t got any ingenious new algae in the pipeline, by any chance? Ideally, something that we can sow on the surface of the New Blue Ocean to help stabilize its temperature and soak up an extra measure of carbon dioxide. The Heavy Metal brigade are still pouring their inherited quadrillions into the search for a mechanical solution, of course, trying to find a mining technology that will allow them to strip the methane out and process it for use as household gas, but you know my take on the problem. Mother Gaia gave us seaweed to help keep the world in balance, so that’s probably the best way to get the balance back again. Edible fish stocks have recovered somewhat since the CC wiped out the dolphins and all those other greedy predators, but all the reports say that the plankton are almost at the end of their tether, and that we need to rebuild the marine ecosphere from the bottom up, if we can. I’ve heard some good things about kelp, but I’d appreciate an off-the-record opinion from someone who isn’t primarily concerned with protecting their EC funding.”
“Algae aren’t the answer,” Gerda told him, bluntly. “I suppose Kelemen Kiss, the Kelp King, has a certain ring to it, but I wouldn’t put your own hard-earned billions into it if I were you. Not that I’m an expert on algae, mind. Modern classification has excluded them from the plant kingdom, so they’re not in Practical Botany’s bag any more.”
“You could have made billions, too, if you’d been prepared to take risks,” Kay pointed out, his features briefly exhibiting what might have been a twinge of guilt. “You can’t blame me for getting rich on your advice. You should have had the balls to act on it yourself.”
“The comment about giving people a better high wasn’t advice, Kay,” Gerda told him. “It was a flippant remark—just idle rhetoric. Only politicians can’t tell the difference.”
He might have blushed at that had his complexion been paler, but any hint of emergent pink was lost in the bronze. “So what is the answer, sister mine?” he asked. “Biotechnically speaking, that is.”
“There was a time,” she said, “when algae pioneered the conquest of the land—but they didn’t hold the lead in that particular race for long. They adapted well enough to fresh water, but the vast expanse of the primal continent required something cleverer. That’s where the plants came in, and never looked back, even though they might have taken a wrong turn or two on evolution’s highway. Maybe it’s time to start looking back, investigating unexplored avenues of potential—or unexplored plunges of potential.”
Kay took a moment or two to catch her meaning. “Oh,” he said, when he had. “You mean reversion to the sea—like the poor old dolphins.”
Gerda nodded. “Not a bad analogy, my love,” she conceded, graciously. “Reptiles and mammals both evolved on land, participants in a selective process driven by the imperatives of land life—but both orders produced species that successfully re-adapted to life in the sea, where many of them preyed very successfully on the fish that had stayed there all along, and others became world-champion plankton-filterers. You’re right—given that plants are so much cleverer than algae, why shouldn’t they produce species better adapted to sea life than the algae are?”
Kay caught a glimpse of a patch of intellectual high ground and raced to occupy it. “Difficult for plants to work on the sea bed, though,” he said. “Chlorophyll only works close to the surface, so that’s where the green algae are, and the food-chains that depend on them; the sea-bed food-chain thrives on the dead bits that sink down.”
“Trees thrive on land,” Gerda said, nodding in agreement, “because there’s considerable selective advantage in lifting foliage up, above the competition—but in the sea, living organisms can float. Even kelp, which often anchors itself to the bottom even in deep water, is basically a floater rather than a sturdy-boled thruster. Only corals build marine dendrites on a truly heroic scale.”
“They used to,” said Kay, glumly. “Almost extinct now. You reckon that could change, though, with a little help from biotech? You think plants might be able to take over the niches that corals have left vacant? You think they might take the shallows back, at least? The forests drowned by rising sea-levels don’t seem to be coping very well on their own, though, and the vast increase in swampland has been disastrous for serious economic activity.”
“That,” said Gerda, “is because it’s the wrong type of swampland. Angiosperm swamplands have always been precarious things, never capable of much in the way of versatility and aggressive expansion. Gymnosperms had a lot more practice at swamp life, especially in the days before the primal continent broke up and continental drift began to open up the deep trenches and push up the high mountains, so that much larger tracts of land dried out completely. Mother Gaia’s drainage system didn’t do the gymnosperms any favors, alas.”
“Cycads!” Kay exclaimed, getting there at last. “I’ve heard good things about cycads, too. Primitive, but lots of untapped potential, according to the reports I’ve scanned. You think they might be able to take back the new shallows—and maybe, in time, the continental shelves—in a manner that will permit agricultural exploitation?”
“Thus far,” Gerda said, as if she were merely following the meandering course of an improvised reverie, “the rise in sea levels has been an unmitigated nuisance—but it might yet provide opportunities as well as threats. With the bulk of the Antarctic ice-cap still to melt, it might be advisable to look harder at the potential opportunities. The ideal sea-bed plant, you know, isn’t one that simply sends up kelp-like fronds to float on the surface....”
“It’s one that extends foliage above the surface,” Kay continued, allowing his imagination to be gripped. “Trunk below, crown above. Algae can’t do that—not without massive genetic modification, at least—but plants might be more readily adaptable ... if only we can identify the right kinds of plant. Plants grow best on land where there’s a lot of leaf litter and other organic debris in the soil ... if marine plants were able to mop up methane from the sea-bed and dissolved carbon dioxide as well as extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they could be really useful. How easy will it be?”
“Fiendishly difficult,” Gerda admitted. “Lots of problems, including the salt in the water, the destructive potential of tides and waves—but even some of those problems might be turned into opportunities, if the genomic strategists are ingenious enough.”
“The reports I get,” Kay mused, “keep telling me that it will take a long time to get the sea-level back down to where it was in the twentieth century, even if we can stabilize the atmospheric temperature. The next best thing, in the short term, is to find a means of making the inundated land economically viable. If it were possible to develop off-shore orchards ... it wouldn’t be much, but it would be better than nothing. What are the chances of putting living accommodation in the crowns of your sea-dwelling trees, and connecting up the individual crowns with rope-bridges or something similar? We could really do with some new rope technologies, to help maintain the price of hemp.”
“It would certainly be possible for people to live in the kind of swampland I envisage,” Gerda said, guardedly, “provided that they were prepared to adapt their lifestyles to the necessities of the situation. With population pressure the way it is, there’d be every incentive.”
“How far away are we from initial viable product?” Kay wanted to know. “Are we talking years, decades, or centuries?”
“Decades, probably,” Gerda said. “Faster, of course, if a few extra trillions of research money were diverted in that direction. It might pay off extravagantly to investors prepared to be a little bit patient.”
“Is that advice, or just idle rhetoric?” he wanted to know.
“It’s an off-the-record opinion from someone who isn’t as unworried about her funding as you might like to believe. It isn’t just money the neo-cycads need, though—they could really benefit from the services of a top class propagandist: a man with the balls to get involved on every level.”
“For the sake of Mother Gaia,” Kay told her, “it’s worth taking the trouble.”
To which Gerda said nothing at all, lest she give the game away.
Kay took the opportunity to change the subject and bring in something else that was on his agenda. “Forty’s still a critical age,” he observed. “More so for you than me. Responsibility urges women not to bring children into a world teetering on the brink of total ecological meltdown, but the species can’t leave reproduction entirely to the irresponsible. Have you made arrangements to put some eggs in cold storage?” He was allowed to ask her questions of that personal nature, because they’d been close friends for such a long time.
“No,” she said, increasing the steeliness of her gaze slightly. “Have you made some provision for your own genetic future?”
This time, there was enough pink to defeat the bronze mask. “There’s not so much urgency in my case,” he said. “As it happens, though, I am planning to get married this year—June, to be exact.”
“Congratulations,” Gerda said, including herself in the congratulations for showing no emotion at all. “Who’s the lucky lady?”
* * * *
Kay’s lucky lady was a nice Magyar girl named Magda, who was a full ten centimeters shorter than Gerda. She did have blonde hair and blue eyes, but they were the consequence of somatic engineering rather than her natural genetic heritage. Gerda honestly couldn’t see what Kay saw in her, given that, whatever it was, he had obviously never bothered to look for it in Gerda. She went to the wedding, though, and didn’t cry or forget to smile.
Gerda also waited until Kay had plunged a substantial fraction of his own fortune into cycad futures, as well as persuading a substantial fraction of the Gaian Economic Priesthood to follow his lead, before she put herself forward as a candidate for the European Parliament in northern Sweden. Because Selma Rosenhane was still going strong as Kiruna’s leading lady, Gerda had to run as a second string on the regional ticket, and only just squeaked home under the labyrinthine rules of the PR system. Once she was in the chamber, however, she soon began to outshine her mother as an orator, if not as a deal-maker behind the scenes.
If Selma was jealous of her daughter’s sudden emergence from academic obscurity on to her own stage, she kept the feeling well-hidden. She soon began telling her daughter what a great team they made, and advising her as to what offices they might both aspire to attain, with the benefit of their combined skills and Siberian backing. The Siberian backing did not materialize, though; as soon as the Russians discovered the full extent of Gerda’s radicalism, they decided that she was too far off message to be accommodated within their tactical schemes. Selma then began lecturing Gerda on the necessity to be pragmatic, and the terrible danger of taking up a position too far away from the parliamentary consensus.
“The Parliamentary consensus is rotten at the core, Mommy,” Gerda told her patient advisor. “It’s due for collapse, and when it does come down it’ll shrivel like a burst balloon. The future lies in providing a nucleus for the new consensus that will take its place.”
“You may think forty’s old,” Selma informed her, sternly, “But it’s not. Starry-eyed ideals are all very well, but politics is the art of the possible.”
“Biotechnology,” Gerda told her, “is the art of the possible too—but strategic genomics is the art of the imaginable ... and the genius of the unimaginable.”
“That kind of glibness might play well to the media,” Selma said, with a hostile edge to her voice, “but it doesn’t wash in the back rooms where the deals are made. If you’re wise, you’ll let me be your guide now that you’re in my world.”
Gerda smiled at the time—and then ignored her mother completely. From her point of view, the decision of the Siberian Oligarchs to oppose her and isolate her within the opposition ranks was a relief and a blessing, because she didn’t want to be stuck with any of their baggage. She had no alternative but to begin her work as a propagandist within the ranks of the existing opposition, but she knew that she needed to build her own constituency in order to steer it in an entirely new direction.
There were two sets of vested interests that sprawled across the political boundary separating the confirmed anti-Gaians from the increasingly disgruntled bad Gaians, and those were the groups that would have to be captured in their entirety if the old Gaian majority were to be conclusively punctured. One set, familiarly known as the “littorals,” consisted of the already dispossessed inhabitants of the inundated coastal regions and the about to be dispossessed inhabitants of the present coastal regions. The other comprised the persistent complex of old industrial interests that Kay called “the Heavy Metal brigade.” Gerda set out to capture them both, beginning with the factions that were already loosely associated with the so-called opposition.
The particular neo-cycads in whose preliminary genomic design she had been involved, she told the two groups, over and over again in every possible venue and context, offered enormous potential, not merely for enhancing the economic potential of the new shallows, but also for developing the economic potential of the old shallows. They would do it not merely by producing new and useful biomass, but also by doing something that had never been done before, which would involve a new collaboration between organic and inorganic technologies, and forge a vital economic link between Big Tech and biotech, living fibers and heavy metal.
On the one hand, Gerda argued, neo-cycads could provide vast tracts of new lebensraum of an admittedly challenging but extremely promising sort; on the other hand, they would generate bioelectricity on a massive scale to feed and replenish the Heavy Metal brigade’s ailing distribution networks. They would achieve the latter trick by taking an entirely new approach to bioelectricity generation: the conversion of tidal energy. The stout boles by which the cycads would attach their ambitious crowns to the sea-bed would not be mere supportive trunks, but would extend net-like and sail-like structures to capture a substantial fraction of the enormous energy imparted by the moon’s gravity to the ocean on a twice-daily basis. The realm of human habitation would become larger than before, and its energy supply would be secured.
All of this, she assured her potential followers, was both possible and practicable. Previous attempts to develop bioelectrical facilities by generic transplantation had gone awry because natural bioelectricity was an animal monopoly, whereas commercial bioelectricity required plant-like supportive structures. That kind of ambitious hybridization had never succeeded using angiosperm stocks—but she and her former collaborators had devised a potential means of achieving the desired end in neo-cycads. Organic and inorganic technology had been estranged for far too long, and had grown accustomed to regarding one another as mere casual acquaintances, if not as enemies—but the time had come for them not merely to become friends, but to indulge in passionate intercourse. A new era was dawning.
At first, everyone thought that she was crazy. Indeed, they never actually stopped thinking that she was crazy—but they did not take long to remember how desperate they were to find some way out of the imprisoning Cubic Centimeter, or at least of making it a more comfortable confinement in which to dwell. Crazy or not, she was offering them a new hope: an alternative to yet more lectures on the Gaian vices and the need for everyone to become more virtuous.
Gaian vices and virtues did not figure in Gerda’s argument at all, even in the beginning. Even then, she did not seek to conceal—although she refrained from laboring the point—that neo-cycads could not and would not flourish in a cool world. If they offered hope now, it was only because the world had already warmed sufficiently to let them offer it. If they were to fulfill that hope generously, they would need to be gifted with the climatic environment that suited them best. Much more active than the trees that had driven their primitive ancestors into tiny corners of the land tens of millions of years in the past—living fast and dying young, by tree standards—the neo-cycads needed a higher ambient temperature in order to do their work, and bioelectric neo-cycads were especially thermophilic. Unlike Gaia’s favorite species, and Gaia herself, neo-cycads liked it hot.
The Gaian reaction was entirely predictable. Humankind, the Gaians argued, was the species that Gaia had favored more than any other, the one that had benefited most from a relatively cool Earth whose carbon was mostly locked away in inert deposits. The new ecosphere that Gerda’s radical biotech would eventually produce would be intrinsically inimical to human beings and human life; that was far too high a price to pay for effective bioelectricity. The core members of the great Gaian coalition regarded this argument as conclusive—but it failed to deliver the expected killer blow, and the coalition found itself leaking support on a serious scale for the first time in a century.
Gerda’s initial support base came from the first of her two potential constituencies—not merely from the Netherlands and Belgium, whose densely packed populations had suffered greater setbacks than any other European nation from the erosions of the sea, but most extravagantly of all from Britain, the Crazy Man of Europe, whose crazy jingoists saw the potential to become an even bigger sceptered isle than before, expanding gradually but majestically into the wilderness of the North Sea until it finally reached the continental shore again.
The Heavy Metal brigade was a little slower to come aboard, even though she took great care to emphasize that it was they who could provide the definitive answer to the Gaian challenge. Heavy Metal, Gerda reminded its power brokers, often and insistently, had always taken the blame for the CC, but it was also Heavy Metal that had made it possible for at least some people—the rich—to live quite comfortably in tropical heat, by means of air conditioning. The spread of air conditioning had long been inhibited by problems of energy generation, but now that those problems were potentially soluble, there was no reason why the Heavy Metal brigade had to continue thinking in terms of air-conditioned buildings or air-conditioned domed estates. The time had come—or soon would come, if the political will could be mustered—to think in terms of air-conditioned cities. If the neo-cycads could be gifted with the hothouse climate they needed and deserved, then Big Tech could start fulfilling its age-old dream of building glittering crystal cities, hermetically sealed by external membranes, whose internal atmospheres could be differentiated at will from the one that the neo-cycads breathed and sustained.
Privately, Gerda did not imagine that enclosed environments would be anything more than a stop-gap solution; her belief was that the lebensraum offered by the neo-cycads would inevitably give rise to a new human species that would love the heat as much as they did, whether by means of genetic engineering, natural selection, or cyborgization. As a practicing politician, however, she stuck to more pragmatic issues and carefully limited imaginative horizons. She was, after all, her mother’s daughter.
* * * *
Gerda knew, and had always known—or at least felt—that she was bound to win in the end. The only real point at issue was how long it would take for the rotten ancien régime of the Gaian majority to crumble away, and for the new consensus to consolidate a step-by-step program.
Many a politician, from Moses onward, had sown the seeds of Promised Lands without living to see more than the faintest glimpse of their reality, but Gerda had always hoped that things might move faster for her, even in a world that was still essentially cool. As things eventually turned out, she was luckier than most, even though she shared the fate of many of those same visionaries in being forced to hand the reins of power over to others some time before the seeds she had sown began to germinate.
By the time Gerda’s sixty-fifth birthday came around, an unholy alliance of Heavy Metal entrepreneurs, Siberian Oligarchs, and resurgent Asian Not-so-Slow Developers had hijacked her prospectus and her party—but it was her slogans that they continued pushing and polishing. She lost the battle for personal control, but she won the war.
When Gerda and Kay met up in London to celebrate their sixty-fifth birthday, seven years had passed since they had last shared such a celebration. The previous one had ended badly, after Kay had accused Gerda of betraying him, by tricking him into investing not merely his own funds but those of hundreds of his allies and acquaintances in research in neo-cycad biotechnology. He really had felt betrayed, and really had believed that she had cruelly taken him for a ride in order to pursue an agenda directly opposite to his, with no other motive but malice aforethought.
When Kay agreed, in response to her urging, that they could get together for their sixty-fifth “to talk over old times,” he still had not forgiven her, but he had accepted the inevitability of circumstance. He had not deserted the ailing rump of the old Gaian coalition, but he had accepted that he was now doomed to be a has-been, to the extent that he had ever been at all, within the political arena. Gerda guessed that he only felt able to face her again because he now considered that she too was a has-been, having been deposed from her various positions of nominal political authority.
“You might have won the war,” he conceded, ungraciously, “and you’ll doubtless say that all’s fair in war, and that there’s no such thing as betrayal in politics, but that’s not what rankles. We were friends—practically brother and sister. It’s the personal betrayal that I can’t stomach. You didn’t have to play me for a sucker. You could have won without doing that.”
“I didn’t play you for a sucker, my love,” she told him. “Everything I told you was true.”
“But it wasn’t the whole truth,” he pointed out. “You never said anything to me about neo-cycads needing a higher atmospheric temperature. You let me believe that they’d be living carbon sinks, just like all the other trees we’d been planting for the last hundred years to soak up carbon emissions. You took advantage of my ignorance. You didn’t have to do that. You didn’t have to involve me at all. You could have left me out of it. That would have been the sisterly thing to do. When we were kids, you told me that we were two halves of the same whole—you should never have betrayed that just to score a point when we happened to end up on opposite sides of the chamber. You didn’t have to oppose me, you know, back in that stupid high school debate. You could have seconded me instead. We could have worked together.”
“You could have seconded me,” she pointed out.
“But you were on the wrong side!” he complained. “You still are, even though you’ve hooked the majority with your counsel of despair. The people who’ve usurped your throne aren’t saving the world—they’re changing it out of all recognition. We could have saved it, Gerda, you and I, if we’d only joined forces in the same cause. I don’t believe for a moment that neo-cycads were the only game in town, or even that your kind of booby-trapped neo-cycads were the only possible means of reclaiming the inundated shallows. We could have taken a different route entirely, biotechnologically speaking—and you should have. You didn’t just betray me; you betrayed the species and the ecosphere.”
“You’re a tactician, Kay,” Gerda told him. “I’m the strategist, remember. I’m the long-term thinker. I didn’t betray you; I saved you—you just haven’t realized it yet. And you did make billions out of cycad speculation—far more money than I ever did.”
That shot struck home, just about—but there was no hint of a blush on Kay’s slightly tightened features. “Well, yes,” he admitted. “If it had only been about the money ... but why didn’t you make billions? Twenty-five years ago, when you gave me the tip about hemp, I thought it was because you were too cautious, too risk-averse ... well, I have to admit to being wrong about that. So why aren’t you super-rich? Why didn’t you back your winner, financially as well as in the chamber?”
“It wasn’t about the money, Kay, it never was.”
“Just a matter of wining the war, then? I never realized that you were so intensely competitive. Sibling rivalry is a terrible thing—and we were practically siblings, weren’t we? Only one barely functional set of parents between the two of us ... not that Miklos and Selma ever ... did they?”
“I don’t think so,” Gerda said. “Mind you, there’s time yet—they’re both retired from the chamber now, so they must be desperate for something to fill in time.”
“Perhaps we should have invited them along—maybe fixed them up?” Kay said, obviously not meaning it. The fact that he now felt able to say something that he blatantly didn’t mean seemed to Gerda to be progress. He couldn’t meet her stare, though, even though an unbiased observer glancing at their table would have taken him for the stronger and younger of the two. They no longer looked uncannily alike, or even remotely similar.
“Perhaps we should have invited your ex-wife,” Gerda countered, “or your son, at least.”
“I haven’t even let on that we’re meeting,” Kay confessed. “Lothar would consider it to be consorting with the enemy, cherishing the blade that stabbed me in the back.”
“And Magda too?” Gerda queried.
“Oh no—she never considered you an enemy or a threat. She always understood our friendship ... at least until you started your great crusade. Like you, she always took the trouble to point out that I had made billions out of neo-cycads, even if I hadn’t fully understood what the cost of the profits would be. She was delighted to take her share—if she were here, she’d be gladly proposing toasts in your honor.”
“For her,” Gerda said, casually, “it was only a matter of love, not war. She must have had a markedly different notion of what was fair—even if her blonde hair was only cosmetic.”
“It’s red now,” Kay told her. “Hot colors are back in fashion, thanks to you. Mind you, silver doesn’t look too bad on you—although you might want to think of having some skin-work done.” Kay’s own face and forehead, needless to say, had not a wrinkle in sight.
“I’m young at heart,” Gerda assured him. “Just like the New New New New World. We are up to four now, aren’t we?”
“Alas, yes,” he said—and then paused, apparently for reflection. Eventually, he went on: “You know, setting all joking and resentment aside, I believe that you and I really might have made a difference, as individuals. If you had only sided with me instead of reacting against me, it really might have been the salvation of the Gaian cause instead of its damnation. If only I had been able to keep you with me, instead of somehow contriving, unknowingly and unwillingly, to turn you against me....”
Gerda didn’t bother to point out that his manner of framing the argument was outrageously egocentric. Instead, she said: “No, Kay, we couldn’t have made that sort of difference. We couldn’t have made much more of a difference even if you’d sided with me instead of relentlessly following the herd. Gaia was always gong to lose the war, no matter how many successful defensive actions her myrmidons completed. The neo-cycads were always bound to carry the day. The Heavy Metal brigade, the Siberian Oligarchs, and the Asian Developers were always bound to end up in bed together, running the show. The only difference I made, and the only difference I was ever capable of making, was to warm things up a little, and hurry them along.”
“You must have felt rather lonely doing it,” Kay observed, retreating into pensive reflection. “It’s still different for a woman, isn’t it? Your mother managed to have it all, though, at least until that stupid accident. Maybe you felt that no one could ever quite live up to the memory of your father.”
“He was dead before I learned to talk,” Gerda said. “I never knew him.”
“My mother’s still alive, but I’ve hardly ever exchanged two words with her. To me, she’s just a sequence of pictures—but that didn’t stop me marrying Magda.”
“No,” Gerda agreed. “It didn’t.” And it was then, oddly enough, rather than at any of the more weighty or awkward moments in the conversation, that Gerda suddenly realized that her love for Kay had cooled somewhat while she had thrown her heart and soul into her cause, and that its once-fiery passion had been transformed by time and tide into something mellower and more even-tempered. It was still most definitely there, and still unfulfilled, but it no longer felt like a dagger of glass rudely jammed into her beating heart. By the same token, she no longer hated Gaia the Snow Queen quite as much as she had before. Their conflict had, after all, merely been a difference of opinion.
“It says something for us, I suppose,” Kay observed, glumly, as he raised his wine-glass in a vaguely celebratory gesture, “that we can still be friends, in spite of everything. The fact that, no matter who’s won and who’s lost, and no matter what becomes of the world now it’s all turned upside-down, we can still hold on to something of what we had when we were six years old says something good and precious not just about us but about the world. I can still think of you as my twin sister, my inevitable counterpart.”
“The world was upside-down before, my love,” Gerda told him, softly. “From now on, it’ll be able to right itself, slowly but surely. The deadly CC is no longer deadly—or, as they say here in dear old England, all’s now well at the beloved Cricket Club.”
“The trouble with you, darling,” Kay replied, with a contrived sigh that was as insincere as it was insulting, “is that you never could take anything seriously.”
Copyright © 2009 Brian Stableford