Читать книгу Green Earth - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 17

Another day for Charlie and Joe. A late spring morning, temperatures already in the high nineties and rising, humidity likewise.

They stayed in the house for the balm of the air-conditioning, falling out of the ceiling vents like spills of clear syrup. They wrestled, they cleaned house, they ate breakfast and elevenses. Charlie read some of the Post while Joe devastated dinosaurs. Something in the Post about India’s drought reminded Charlie of the Khembalis, and he put in his earphone and called his friend Sridar.

“Charlie, good to hear from you! I got your message.”

“Oh good, I was hoping. How’s the lobbying going?”

“We’re keeping at it. We’ve got some interesting clients.”

“As always.”

Sridar worked for Branson & Ananda, a small but prestigious firm representing several foreign governments in their dealings with the American government. Some of these governments had policies and customs at home that made representing them to Congress a challenge.

“So you said something about a new country?”

“It’s through Anna, like I said. Have you heard of Khembalung?”

“I think so. One of the League of Drowning Nations?”

“Yeah that’s right.”

“You’re asking me to take on a sinking island?”

“They’re not sinking, it’s the ocean that’s rising.”

“Even worse! What are we going to do about that, stop global warming?”

“Well, yeah. That’s the idea. And you know, you’d have lots of allies.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway they could use your help, and they’re good guys. Interesting. I think you’d enjoy them. You should meet them and see.”

“Okay, my plate is kind of full right now, but I could do that.”

“Oh good. Thanks Sridar, I appreciate that.”

“No problem. Hey can I have Krakatoa too?”

After that Charlie was in the mood to talk, but he had no reason to call anybody. He and Joe played again. Bored, Charlie even resorted to turning on the TV. A pundit show came on and helplessly he watched. “They are such lapdogs,” he complained to Joe. “It’s disgusting.”

“BOOM!” Joe concurred, catching Charlie’s mood and flinging a tyrannosaurus into the radiator with a clang.

“That’s right,” Charlie said. “Good job.”

He changed the channel to ESPN 5, which showed classic women’s volleyball doubles all day along. Retired guys at home must be a big demographic. But Joe had had enough of being in the house. “Go!” he said imperiously, hammering the front door with a diplodocus. “Go! Go! Go!”

“All right all right.”

Joe’s point was undeniable. They couldn’t stay in this house all day. “Let’s go down to the Mall, we haven’t done that for a while. The Mall, Joe! But you have to get in your backpack.”

Joe nodded and tried to climb into his baby backpack immediately, a very tippy business. He was ready to party.

“Wait, let’s change your diaper first.”

“NO!”

“Ah come on Joe. Yes.”

“NO!”

“But yes.”

They fought like maniacs through a diaper change, each ruthless and determined, each shouting, beating, pinching. Charlie did the necessary things.

Red-faced and sweating, finally they were ready to emerge from the house into the steambath of the city. Out they went. Down to the Metro, down into that dim cool underground world.

It would have been good if the Metro pacified Joe as it once had Nick, but in fact it usually energized him. Charlie could not understand that; he himself found the dim coolness a powerful soporific. But Joe wanted to play around just above the drop to the power rail, being naturally attracted to that enormous source of energy. The hundred-thousand-watt child. Charlie ran around keeping him from the edge. Finally a train came.

Joe liked the Metro cars. He stood on the seat next to Charlie and stared at the concrete walls sliding by outside the tinted windows of the car, then at the bright orange or pink seats, the ads, the people in their car, the brief views of the underground stations they stopped in.

A young black man got on carrying a helium-filled birthday balloon. He sat down across the car from Charlie and Joe. Joe stared at the balloon, boggled by it. Clearly it was for him a kind of miraculous object. The youth pulled down on its string and let the balloon jump back up to its full extension. Joe jerked, then burst out laughing. His giggle was like his mom’s, a low gorgeous burbling. People in the car grinned to hear it. The young man pulled the balloon down again, let it go again. Joe laughed so hard he had to sit down. People began to laugh with him, they couldn’t help it. The young man was smiling shyly. He did the trick again and now the whole car followed Joe into paroxysms of laughter. They laughed all the way to Metro Center.

Charlie got out, grinning, and carried Joe to the Blue/Orange level. He marveled at the infectiousness of moods in a group. Strangers who would never meet again, unified suddenly by a youth and toddler playing a game. By laughter itself. Maybe the real oddity was how much one’s fellow citizens were usually like furniture in one’s life.

Joe bounced in Charlie’s arms. He liked Metro Center’s crisscrossing mysterious vastness. The incident of the balloon was already forgotten. Their next Metro car reached the Smithsonian station, and Charlie put Joe into the backpack, and they rode the escalator up into the kiln blaze of the Mall.

The sky was milky white everywhere. It felt like the inside of a sauna. Charlie fought his way through the heat to an open patch of grass in the shade of the Washington Monument. He sat them down and got out some food. The big views up to the Capitol and down to the Lincoln Memorial pleased him. Out from under the great forest. It was like escaping Mirkwood. This in Charlie’s opinion accounted for the great popularity of the Mall; the monuments and the Smithsonian buildings were nice but supplementary, it was really a matter of getting out into the open. The ordinary reality of the American West was like a glimpse of heaven here in the green depths of the swamp.

Charlie cherished the old story of how the first thirteen states had needed a capital, but no particular state could be allowed to nab that honor; so they had bickered, you give up some land, no, you give it, until finally Virginia had said to Maryland, look, where the Potomac meets the Anacostia there’s a big nasty swamp. It’s worthless, dreadful, pestilent land. You’ll never be able to make anything out of a place like that.

True, Maryland had said. Okay, we’ll give that land to the nation for its capital. But not too much! Just that worst part!

And so here they were. Charlie sat on grass, drowsing. Joe gamboled about him like a bumblebee. The diffuse midday light lay on them like asthma. Big white clouds mushroomed to the west, and the scene turned glossy, bulging with internal light. The ductile world, everything bursting with light. He really had to try to remember to bring his sunglasses on these trips.

To get a good long nap from Joe, he needed to tank him up. Charlie fought his own sleep, got the food bag out of the backpack’s undercarriage, waved it so Joe could see it. Joe trundled over, eyelids at half-mast; no time to lose. He settled into Charlie’s lap and Charlie popped a bottle of Anna’s milk into his mouth just as his head was snapping to the side.

Joe sucked himself unconscious while Charlie slumped over him, chin on chest, comatose. Snuggling an infant in mind-numbing heat, what could be cozier.

Clouds over the White House were billowing up like the spirit of the building’s feisty inhabitant, round, dense, shiny white. In the other direction, over the Supreme Court’s neighborhood, stood a black nine-lobed cloud, dangerously laden with incipient lightning. Yes, the powers of Washington were casting up thermals and forming clouds over themselves, clouds that expressed precisely their spirits. Charlie saw that each cumulobureaucracy transcended the individuals who temporarily performed its functions in the world. These transhuman spirits all had inborn characters and biographies, and abilities and desires and habits all their own; and in the sky over the city they contested their fates. Humans were like cells in their bodies. Probably one’s cells also thought their lives were important and under their control. But the great bodies knew better.

Over the white dome of the Capitol, however, the air shimmered. Congress was a roaring thermal so hot that no cloud could form in it.

He had fallen into a slumber as deep as Joe’s when his phone rang. He answered it before waking.

“Wha.”

“Charlie? Charlie, where are you? We need you down here right now.”

“I’m already down here.”

“Really? That’s great. Charlie?”

“Yes, Roy?”

“Look, Charlie, sorry to bother you, but Phil is out of town and I’ve got to meet with Senator Ellington in twenty minutes, and we just got a call from the White House saying that Dr. Strangelove wants to meet with us to talk about Phil’s climate bill. It sounds like they’re ready to listen, maybe ready to talk too, or even to deal. We need someone to get over there.”

“Now?”

“Now. You’ve got to get over there.”

“I’m already over there, but look, I can’t. I’ve got Joe here with me. Where is Phil again?”

“San Francisco.”

“Wasn’t Wade supposed to get back?”

“No he’s still in Antarctica. Listen Charlie, there’s no one here who can do this but you.”

“What about Andrea?” Andrea Palmer was Phil’s legislative director, the person in charge of all his bills.

“She’s in New York today. Besides you’re the point man on this, it’s your bill more than anyone else’s, you know it inside out.”

“But I’ve got Joe!”

“Maybe you can take Joe along.”

“Yeah right.”

“Hey, why not? Won’t he be taking a nap soon?”

“He is right now.”

Charlie could see the trees backing the White House, there on the other side of the Ellipse. He could walk over there in ten minutes. Theoretically Joe would stay asleep a couple of hours. And certainly they should seize the moment on this, because so far the President and his people had shown no interest whatsoever in dealing.

“Listen,” Roy cajoled, “I’ve had entire lunches with you where Joe is asleep on your back, and believe me, no one can tell the difference. I mean you hold yourself upright like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders, but you did that before you had Joe, so now he just fills up that space and makes you look more normal, I swear to God. You’ve voted with him on your back, you’ve shopped, you’ve showered, you sure as hell can talk to the President’s science advisor. Doctor Strangelove isn’t going to care.”

“He’s a jerk.”

“So? They’re all jerks over there but the President, and he is too, but he’s a nice guy. And he’s the family president, right? He would approve on principle, you can tell Strengloft that. You can say that if the President were there he would love it. He would autograph Joe’s head like a baseball.”

“Yeah right.”

“Charlie, this is your bill!”

“Okay okay okay!” It was true. “I’ll go give it a try.”

So, by the time Charlie got Joe back on his back (the child was twice as heavy when asleep) and walked across the Mall and the Ellipse, Roy had made the calls and they were expecting him at the west entry to the White House. Joe was passed through security with a light-fingered shakedown that was especially squeamish around his diaper. Then they were through, and quickly escorted into a conference room.

The room was empty. Charlie had never been in it before, though he had visited the White House several times. Joe weighed on his shoulders.

Dr. Zacharius Strengloft, the President’s science advisor, entered the room. He and Charlie had sparred by proxy before, Charlie whispering killer questions into Phil’s ear while Strengloft testified before Phil’s committee, but the two of them had never spoken one-on-one. Now they shook hands, Strengloft peering curiously over Charlie’s shoulder. Charlie explained Joe’s presence as briefly as he could, and Strengloft received the explanation with precisely the kind of frosty faux benevolence that Charlie had been expecting. Strengloft in Charlie’s opinion was a pompous ex-academic of the worst kind, hauled out of the depths of a second-rate conservative think tank when the administration’s first science advisor had been sent packing for saying that global warming might be real and not only that, amenable to human mitigation. That went too far for this administration. Their line was that it would be much too expensive to do anything about it, so they were going to punt and let the next generation solve the problem in their own time. In other words, the hell with them. Easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit.

All this had become quite blatant since Strengloft’s appointment. He had taken over the candidate lists for all federal science advisory panels, and now candidates were being routinely asked who they had voted for in the last election, and what they thought of stem-cell research, and abortion, and evolution. When Strengloft’s views were publicized and criticized, he had commented, “You need a diversity of opinions to get good advice.” Mentioning his name was enough to make Anna hiss.

Be that as it may, here he was standing before Charlie; he had to be dealt with, and in the flesh he seemed friendly.

They had just gotten through their introductory pleasantries when the President himself entered the room.

Strengloft nodded complacently, as if he were often joined in his crucial work by the happy man.

“Oh, hello, Mr. President,” Charlie said helplessly.

“Hello, Charles,” the President said, and came over and shook his hand.

This was bad. Not unprecedented, or even terribly surprising; the President was known for wandering into meetings apparently by accident but perhaps not. It had become part of his legendarily informal style.

Now he saw Joe sacked out on Charlie’s back, and stepped around Charlie to get a better view. “What’s this, Charles, you got your kid with you?”

“Yes sir, I was called in on short notice when Dr. Strengloft asked for a meeting with Phil and Wade, they’re both out of town.”

The President found this amusing. “Ha! Well, good for you. That’s sweet. Find me a marker pen and I’ll sign his little head.” This was another signature move, so to speak. “Is he a boy or a girl?”

“A boy. Joe Quibler.”

“Well that’s great. Saving the world before bedtime, that’s your story, eh Charles?” He smiled to himself and moved restlessly over to the chair at the window end of the table. One of his people was standing in the door, watching them without expression.

The President’s face was smaller than it appeared on TV, Charlie found. The size of an ordinary human face, no doubt, looking small precisely because of all the TV images. On the other hand it had a tremendous solidity and three-dimensionality to it. It gleamed with reality.

His eyes were slightly close-set, as was often remarked, but apart from that he looked like an aging movie star or catalog model. A successful businessman who had retired to go into public service. His features, as many observers had observed, mixed qualities of several recent presidents into one blandly familiar and reassuring face, with a little dash of piquant antiquity and edgy charm.

Now his amused look was like that of everyone’s favorite uncle. “So they reeled you in for this on the fly.” Then, holding a hand up to stop all of them, he near-whispered: “Sorry—should I whisper?”

“No sir, no need for that,” Charlie assured him in his ordinary speaking voice. “He’s out for the duration. Pay no attention to that man behind the shoulder.”

The President smiled. “Got a wizard on your back, eh?”

Charlie nodded, smiling quickly to conceal his surprise. It was a pastime in some circles to judge just how much of a dimwit the President was, but facing him in person Charlie felt instantly confirmed in his minority opinion that the man had such a huge amount of low cunning that it amounted to a kind of genius. The President was no fool. And hip to at least the most obvious of movie trivia. Charlie couldn’t help feeling a bit reassured.

Now the President said, “That’s nice, Charles, let’s get to it then, shall we? I heard from Dr. S. here about the meeting this morning, and I wanted to check in on it in person, because I like Phil Chase. And I understand that Phil now wants us to join in with the actions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to the point of introducing a bill mandating our participation in whatever action they recommend, no matter what it is. And this is a UN panel.”

“Well,” Charlie said, shifting gears into ultradiplomatic mode, not just for the President but for the absent Phil, who was going to be upset with him no matter what he said, since only Phil should actually be talking to the President about this stuff. “That isn’t exactly how I would put it, Mr. President. You know the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a number of hearings this year, and Phil’s conclusion after all that testimony was that the global climate situation is quite real. And serious to the point of being already almost too late.”

The President shot a glance at Strengloft. “Would you agree with that, Dr. S.?”

“We’ve agreed that there is general agreement that the observed warming is real.”

The President looked to Charlie, who said, “That’s good as far as it goes, certainly. It’s what follows from that that matters—you know, in the sense of us trying to do something about it.”

Charlie swiftly rehearsed the situation, known to all: average temperatures up by six degrees Fahrenheit already, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere topping 600 parts per million, from a start before the industrial revolution of 280, and predicted to hit 1,000 ppm within a decade, which would be higher than it had been at any time in the past seventy million years. Also the long-term persistence of greenhouse gases, on the order of thousands of years.

Charlie also spoke briefly of the death of all coral reefs, which would lead to even more severe consequences for oceanic ecosystems. “The thing is, Mr. President, the world’s climate can shift very rapidly. There are scenarios in which a general warming causes parts of the Northern Hemisphere to get quite cold, especially in Europe. If that were to happen, Europe could become something like the Yukon of Asia.”

“Really!” the President said. “Are we sure that would be a bad thing? Just kidding of course.”

“Of course sir, ha ha.”

The President fixed him with a look of mock displeasure. “Well, Charles, all that may be true, but we don’t know for sure if any of that is the result of human activity. Isn’t that a fact?”

“No sir,” Charlie said doggedly. “The carbon we’ve burned is different than what was already up there, so we do know. You could say it isn’t for sure that the sun will come up tomorrow morning, and in a limited sense you’d be right, but I’ll bet you the sun will come up.”

“Don’t be tempting me to gamble now.”

“Besides, Mr. President, you don’t delay acting on crucial matters when you have a disaster that might happen, just because you can’t be one hundred percent sure it will happen. Because you can never be one hundred percent sure of anything, and some of these matters are too important to wait on.”

The President frowned at this, and Strengloft interjected, “Charlie, you know the precautionary principle is an imitation of actuarial insurance that has no real resemblance to it, because the risk and the premium paid can’t be calculated. That’s why we refused to hear any precautionary principle language in the discussions we attended at the UN. We said we wouldn’t even attend if they talked about precautionary principles or ecological footprints, and we had very good reasons for those exclusions, because those concepts are not good science.”

The President nodded his “So that is that” nod, familiar to Charlie from many a press conference. He added, “I always thought a footprint was kind of a simplistic measurement for something this complex anyway.”

Charlie countered, “It’s just a name for a good economic index, Mr. President, calculating use of resources in terms of how much land it would take to provide them. It’s pretty educational, really,” and he launched into a quick description of the way it worked. “It’s a good thing to know, like balancing your checkbook, and what it shows is that America is consuming the resources of ten times the acreage it actually occupies. So that if everyone on Earth tried to live as we do, given the greater population densities in much of the world, it would take fourteen Earths to support us all.”

“Come on, Charlie,” Dr. Strengloft objected. “Next you’ll be wanting us to use Bhutan’s Gross Domestic Happiness, for goodness’ sake. But we can’t use little countries’ indexes, they don’t do the job. We’re the hyperpower. And really, the anticarbon crowd is a special interest lobby in itself. You’ve fallen prey to their arguments, but it’s not like CO₂ is some toxic pollutant. It’s a gas that is natural in our air, and it’s essential for plants, even good for them. The last time there was a significant rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, human agricultural productivity boomed. The Norse settled Greenland during that period, and there were generally rising lifespans.”

“The end of the Black Death might account for that,” Charlie pointed out.

“Well, maybe rising CO₂ levels ended the Black Death.”

Charlie felt his jaw gape.

“It’s the bubbly in my club soda,” the President told him gently.

“Yes.” Charlie rallied. “But a greenhouse gas nevertheless. It holds in heat that would otherwise escape back into space. And we’re putting more than two billion tons of it into the atmosphere every year. It’s like putting a plug in your exhaust pipe, sir. The car is bound to warm up. There’s general agreement from the scientific community that it causes really significant warming. Has already caused it.”

“Our models show the recent temperature changes to be within the range of natural fluctuation,” Dr. Strengloft replied. “In fact, temperatures in the stratosphere have gone down, and there’s been eighteen years of flat air temperatures. It’s complex, and we’re studying it, and we’re going to make the best and most cost-effective response to it. Meanwhile, we’re already taking effective precautions. The President has asked American businesses to limit the growth of carbon dioxide to one-third of the economy’s rate of growth.”

“But that’s the same ratio of emissions to growth we have already.”

“Yes, but the President has gone further, by asking American businesses to try to reduce that ratio over the next decade by eighteen percent. It’s a growth-based approach that will accelerate new technologies, and the partnerships that we’ll need with the developing world on climate change.”

As the President looked to Charlie to see what he would reply to this errant nonsense, Charlie felt Joe stir on his back. This was unfortunate, as things were already complicated enough. The President and his science advisor were not only ignoring the specifics of Phil’s bill, they were actively attacking its underlying concepts. Any hope Charlie had had that the President had come to throw his weight behind some real dickering was gone.

And Joe was definitely stirring. His face was burrowed sideways into the back of Charlie’s neck, as usual, and now he began doing something that he sometimes did when napping: he latched on to the right tendon at the back of Charlie’s neck and began sucking it rhythmically, like a pacifier. Always before Charlie had found this a sweet thing, one of the most momlike moments of his Mr. Momhood. Now he had to steel himself to it and forge on.

The President said, “I think we have to be very careful what kind of science we use in matters like these.”

Joe sucked a ticklish spot and Charlie smiled reflexively and then grimaced, not wanting to appear amused by this double-edged pronouncement.

“Naturally that’s true, Mr. President. But the arguments for taking vigorous action are coming from a broad range of scientific organizations, also governments, the UN, NGOs, universities, about ninety-seven percent of all the scientists who have ever declared on the issue,” everyone but the very far right end of the think tank and pundit pool, he wanted to add, everyone but hack pseudoscientists who would say anything for money, like Dr. Strengloft here—but he bit his tongue and tried to shift track. “Think of the world as a balloon, Mr. President. And the atmosphere as the skin of the balloon. Now, if you wanted the thickness of the skin of a balloon to correctly represent the thickness of our atmosphere in relation to Earth, the balloon would have to be about as big as a basketball.”

At the moment this barely made sense even to Charlie, although it was a good analogy if you could enunciate it clearly. “What I mean is that the atmosphere is really, really thin, sir. It’s well within our power to alter it greatly.”

“No one contests that, Charles. But look, didn’t you say the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere was six hundred parts per million? So if that CO₂ were to be the skin of your balloon, and the rest of the atmosphere was the air inside it, then that balloon would have to be a lot bigger than a basketball, right? About the size of the moon or something?”

Strengloft snorted happily at this thought, and went to a computer console on a desk in the corner, no doubt to compute the exact size of the balloon in the President’s analogy. Charlie suddenly understood that Strengloft would never have thought of this argument, and realized further—instantly thereby understanding several people in his past who had mystified him at the time—that sometimes people known for intelligence were actually quite dim, while people who seemed a bit dim could on the contrary be very sharp.

“Granted, sir, very good,” Charlie conceded. “But think of that CO₂ skin as being a kind of glass that lets in light but traps all the heat inside. It’s that kind of barrier. So the thickness isn’t as important as the glassiness.”

“Then maybe more of it won’t make all that much of a difference,” the President said kindly. “Look, Charles. Fanciful comparisons are all very well, but the truth is we have to slow these emissions’ growth before we can try to stop them, much less reverse them.”

This was exactly what the President had said at a recent press conference, and over at the computer Strengloft beamed and nodded to hear it, perhaps because he had authored the line. The absurdity of taking pride in writing stupid lines for a quick president suddenly struck Charlie as horribly funny. He was glad Anna wasn’t there beside him, because in moments like these, the slightest shared glance could set them off guffawing like kids. Even the thought of her in such a situation almost made him laugh.

So now he banished his wife and her glorious hilarity from his mind, not without a final bizarre tactile image of the back of his neck as one of her breasts, being suckled more and more hungrily by Joe. Very soon it was going to be time for a bottle.

Charlie persevered nevertheless. “Sir, it’s getting kind of urgent now. And there’s no downside to taking the lead on this issue. The economic advantages of being in the forefront of climate rectification and bioinfrastructure mitigation are huge. It’s a growth industry with uncharted potential. It’s the future no matter which way you look at it.”

Joe clamped down hard on his neck. Charlie shivered. Hungry, no doubt about it. Would be ravenous on waking. Only a bottle of milk or formula would keep him from going ballistic at that point. He could not be roused now without disaster striking. But he was beginning to inflict serious pain. Charlie lost his train of thought. He twitched. A little snort of agony combined with a giggle. He choked it back, disguised it as a smothered cough.

“What’s the matter, Charles, is he waking up on you?”

“Oh no sir, still out. Maybe stirring a little—ah! The thing is, if we don’t address these issues now, nothing else we’re doing will matter. None of it will go well.”

“That sounds like alarmist talk to me,” the President said, an avuncular twinkle in his eye. “Let’s calm down about this. You’ve got to stick to the commonsense idea that sustainable economic growth is the key to environmental progress.”

“Sustainable, ah!”

“What’s that?”

He clamped down on a giggle. “Sustainable’s the point! Sir.”

“We need to harness the power of markets,” Strengloft said, and nattered on in his usual vein, apparently oblivious to Charlie’s problem. The President however eyed him closely. Huge chomp. Charlie’s spine went electric. He suppressed the urge to swat his son like a mosquito. His right fingers tingled. Very slowly he lifted a shoulder, trying to dislodge him. Like trying to budge a limpet. Sometimes Anna had to squeeze his nostrils shut to get him to come off. Don’t think about that.

The President said, “Charles, we’d be sucking the life out of the economy if we were to go too far with this. You chew on that awhile. As it is, we’re taking bites out of this problem every day. Why, I’m like a dog with a bone on this thing! Those enviro special interests are like pigs at a trough. We’re weaning them from all that now, and they don’t like it, but they’re going to have to learn that if you can’t lick them, you—”

And Charlie dissolved into gales of helpless laughter.