The Ministry for the Future Read online

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

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

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

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

  His water jug was empty. The taps had stopped running. There were two big water cans in the refrigerator, but he didn’t talk about those. He refilled his jug from one of them, in the dark; the water was still a bit cool. He went back to work.

  Four more people died that night. In the morning the sun again rose like the blazing furnace of heat that it was, blasting the rooftop and its sad cargo of wrapped bodies. Every rooftop and, looking down at the town, every sidewalk too was now a morgue. The town was a morgue, and it was as hot as ever, maybe hotter. The thermometer now said 42 degrees, humidity 60 percent. Frank looked at the screens dully. He had slept about three hours, in snatches. The generator was still chuntering along in its irregular two-stroke, the A/C box was still vibrating like the bad fan it was. The sound of other generators and air conditioners still filled the air. But it wasn’t going to make any difference.

  He went downstairs and opened the safe and called Preeti again on the satellite phone. After twenty or forty tries, she picked up. “What is it?”

  “Look, we need help here,” he said. “We’re dying here.”

  “What do you think?” she said furiously. “Do you think you’re the only ones?”

  “No, but we need help.”

  “We all need help!” she cried.

  Frank paused to ponder this. It was hard to think. Preeti was in Delhi.

  “Are you okay there?” he asked.

  No answer. Preeti had hung up.

  His eyes were stinging again. He wiped them clear, went back upstairs to get the buckets in the bathroom. They were filling more slowly now; people were emptied out. Without a water supply, they would have to move soon, one way or the other.

  When he came back from the street and opened his door there was a rush and he was knocked inside. Three young men held him down on the floor, one with a squared-off black handgun as big as his head. He pointed the gun and Frank looked at the round circle of the barrel end pointed at him, the only round part of a squared-off thing of black metal. The whole world contracted to that little circle. His blood pounded through him and he felt his body go rigid. Sweat poured from his face and palms.

  “Don’t move,” one of the other men said. “Move and you die.”

  Cries from upstairs tracked the intruders’ progress. The muffled sounds of the generator and A/C cut off. The more general mumble of the town came wafting in the open doorway. People passing by stared curiously and moved on. There weren’t very many of them. Frank tried to breathe as shallowly as possible. The stinging in his right eye was ferocious, but he only clamped the eye shut and with the other stared resolutely away. He felt he should resist, but he wanted to live. It was as if he were watching the whole scene from halfway up the stairs, well outside his body and any feelings it might be feeling. All except the stinging in his eye.

  The gang of young men clomped downstairs with generator and A/C unit. Out they went into the street. The men holding Frank down let him go. “We need this more than you do,” one of them explained.

  The man with the gun scowled as he heard this. He pointed the gun at Frank one last time. “You did this,” he said, and then they slammed the door on him and were gone.

  Frank stood, rubbed his arms where the men had grasped him. His heart was still racing. He felt sick to his stomach. Some people from upstairs came down and asked how he was. They were worried about him, they were concerned he had been hurt. This solicitude pierced him, and suddenly he felt more than he could afford to feel. He sat on the lowest stair and hid his face in his hands, racked by a sudden paroxysm. His tears made his eyes sting less.

  Finally he stood up. “We have to go to the lake,” he said. “There’s water there, and it will be cooler. Cooler in the water and on the sidewalk.”

  Several of the women were looking unhappy at this, and one of them said, “You may be right, but there will be too much sun. We should wait until dark.”

  Frank nodded. “That makes sense.”

  He went back to the little store with its owner, feeling jittery and light-headed and weak. The sauna feeling hammered him and it was hard to carry a sack of food and canned and bottled drinks back to the clinic. Nevertheless he helped ferry over six loads of supplies. Bad as he felt, it seemed as if he was stronger than many of the others in their little group. Although at times he wondered if some of them could in fact just keep dragging along like this all day. But none of them spoke as they walked, nor even met eyes.

  “We can get more later,” the shop owner finally declared.

  The day passed. Wails of grief were now muffled to groans. People were too hot and thirsty to make any fuss, even when their children died. Red eyes in brown faces, staring at Frank as he stumbled among them, trying to help get corpses of family members up onto the roof, where they scorched in the sun. Bodies would be rotting, but maybe they would anneal and dry out before that, it was so hot. No odors could survive in this heat, only the smell of scorched steamy air itself. Or maybe not: sudden smell of rotting meat. No one lingered up here now. Frank counted fourteen wrapped bodies, adult and child. Glancing across that rooftop level of the town he saw that other people were similarly engaged, silent, withdrawn, down-gazing, hurrying. No one he could see looked around as he was looking around.

  Downstairs the food and drink were already gone. Frank made a count, which he found hard. Something like fifty-two people in the clinic. He sat on the stairs for a while, then went in the closet and stared at its contents. He refilled his water jug, drank deeply, refilled it again. No longer cool, but not hot. There was the can of gas; they could burn the bodies if they had to. There was another generator, but there was nothing to power with it that would do any good. The satellite phone was still charged, but there was no one to call. He wondered if he should call his mom. Hi Mom, I’m dying. No.

  The day crawled second by second to its last hour, and then Frank conferred with the store owner and his friends. In murmurs they all agreed; time to go to the lake.
They roused the people, explained the plan, helped those who needed it to stand, to get down the stairs. A few couldn’t do it; that presented a quandary. A few old men said they would stay behind as long as they were needed, then come along to the lake. They said goodbye to the people leaving as if things were normal, but their eyes gave it all away. Many wept as they left the clinic.

  They made their way in the afternoon shadows to the lake. Hotter than ever. No one on the streets and sidewalks. No wailing from the buildings. Still some generators grumbling, some fans grinding. Sound seemed stunted in the livid air.

  At the lake they found a desperate scene. There were many, many people in the lake, heads dotted the surface everywhere around the shores, and out where it was presumably deeper there were still heads, people semi-submerged as they lay on impromptu rafts of one sort or another. But not all of these people were alive. The surface of the lake seemed to have a low miasma rising out of it, and now the stink of death, of rotting meat, could be discerned in one’s torched nostrils.

  They agreed it might be best to start by sitting on the low lakeshore walkway or corniche and put their legs in the water. Down at the end of the walkway there was still room to do that, and they trudged down together and sat as a group, in a line. The concrete under them was still radiating the day’s heat. They were all sweating, except for some who weren’t, who were redder than the rest, incandescent in the shadows of the late afternoon. As twilight fell they propped these people up and helped them to die. The water of the lake was as hot as bath water, clearly hotter than body temperature, Frank thought; hotter than the last time he had tested it. It only made sense. He had read that if all the sun’s energy that hit Earth were captured by it rather than some bouncing away, temperatures would rise until the seas boiled. He could well imagine what that would be like. The lake felt only a few degrees from boiling.

  And yet sometime after sunset, as the quick twilight passed and darkness fell, they all got in the water. It just felt better. Their bodies told them to do it. They could sit on the shallowest part of the lake bottom, heads out of water, and try to endure.

  Sitting next to Frank was a young man he had seen playing the part of Karna in one of the plays at the local mela, and Frank felt his blankness pierced again, as when the people had shown concern for him, by the memory of the young man at the moment Arjuna had rendered Karna helpless with a spoken curse and was about to kill him; at that point the young man had shouted triumphantly, “It’s only fate!” and managed to take one last swing before going down under Arjuna’s impervious sword. Now the young man was sipping the water of the lake, round-eyed with dread and sorrow. Frank had to look the other way.

  The heat began to go to his head. His body crawled with the desire to get out of this too-hot bath, run like one would from a sauna into the icy lake that ought to accompany all such saunas, feel that blessed shock of cold smacking the breath out of his lungs as he had felt it once in Finland. People there spoke of trying to maximize the temperature differential, shift a hundred degrees in a second and see what that felt like.

  But this train of thought was like scratching an itch and thereby making it worse. He tasted the hot lake water, tasted how foul it was, filled with organics and who knew what. Still he had a thirst that couldn’t be slaked. Hot water in one’s stomach meant there was no refuge anywhere, the world both inside and outside well higher than human body temperature ought to be. They were being poached. Surreptitiously he uncapped his water jug and drank. Its water was now tepid, but not hot, and it was clean. His body craved it and he couldn’t stop himself, he drank it all down.

  People were dying faster than ever. There was no coolness to be had. All the children were dead, all the old people were dead. People murmured what should have been screams of grief; those who could still move shoved bodies out of the lake, or out toward the middle where they floated like logs, or sank.

  Frank shut his eyes and tried not to listen to the voices around him. He was fully immersed in the shallows, and could rest his head back against the concrete edge of the walkway and the mud just under it. Sink himself until he was stuck in mud and only half his head exposed to the burning air.

  The night passed. Only the very brightest stars were visible, blurs swimming overhead. A moonless night. Satellites passing overhead, east to west, west to east, even once north to south. People were watching, they knew what was happening. They knew but they didn’t act. Couldn’t act. Didn’t act. Nothing to do, nothing to say. Many years passed for Frank that night. When the sky lightened, at first to a gray that looked like clouds, but then was revealed to be only a clear and empty sky, he stirred. His fingertips were all pruney. He had been poached, slow-boiled, he was a cooked thing. It was hard to raise his head even an inch. Possibly he would drown here. The thought caused him to exert himself. He dug his elbows in, raised himself up. His limbs were like cooked spaghetti draping his bones, but his bones moved of their own accord. He sat up. The air was still hotter than the water. He watched sunlight strike the tops of the trees on the other side of the lake; it looked like they were bursting into flame. Balancing his head carefully on his spine, he surveyed the scene. Everyone was dead.

  2

  I am a god and I am not a god. Either way, you are my creatures. I keep you alive.

  Inside I am hot beyond all telling, and yet my outside is even hotter. At my touch you burn, though I spin outside the sky. As I breathe my big slow breaths, you freeze and burn, freeze and burn.

  Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me.

  3

  Article 14 of the Paris Agreement Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change called for a periodic taking stock of all the signatory nations’ carbon emissions, which meant in effect the total global carbon burn for the year in question. The first “global stocktake” was scheduled for 2023, and then every five years after that.

  That first global stocktake didn’t go well. Reporting was inconsistent and incomplete, and yet still it was very clear that carbon emissions were far higher than the Parties to the Agreement had promised each other they would be, despite the 2020 dip. Very few nations had hit the targets they had set for themselves, even though they had set soft targets. Aware of the shortfall even before the 2023 stocktake, 108 countries had promised to strengthen their pledges; but these were smaller countries, amounting together to about 15 percent of global total emissions.

  So at the annual Conference of the Parties the following year, some delegations pointed out that the Agreement’s Article 16, clause 4, specified that the COP “shall make the decisions necessary to promote the Agreement’s effective implementation by establishing such subsidiary bodies as are deemed necessary for the implementation of the Agreement.” They also pointed to Article 18, clause 1, which allowed the COP to create new “Subsidiary Bodies for Implementation of the Agreement.” These subsidiary bodies had previously been understood to mean committees that met only during the annual COP gatherings, but now some delegates argued that given the general failure of the Agreement so far, a new subsidiary body with permanent duties, and the resources to pursue them, was clearly needed to help push the process forward.

  So at COP29, held in Bogotá, Colombia, the Parties to the Agreement created a new Subsidiary Body for Implementation of the Agreement, as authorized by Articles 16 and 18, to be funded using the funding protocols outlined in Article 8, which bound all Parties to the methods outlined in the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage. The announcement said:

  “Be it resolved that a Subsidiary Body authorized by this twenty-ninth Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the parties to the Paris Climate Agreement (CMA) is hereby established, to work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and all the agencies of the United Nations, and all the governments signatory to the Paris Agreement, to advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens, whose rights, as defined in the Universal Declaration o
f Human Rights, are as valid as our own. This new Subsidiary Body is furthermore charged with defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves, by promoting their legal standing and physical protection.”

  Someone in the press named this new agency “the Ministry for the Future,” and the name stuck and spread, and became what the new agency was usually called. It was established in Zurich, Switzerland, in January of 2025.

  Not long after that, the big heat wave struck India.

  4

  Above the campus of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich rises to a forest park on top of the Zuriberg, the hill that forms the eastern flank of the city. Most of the city covers the banks of the river Limmat, which begins as the outlet of the Zurichsee and drains northward between two hills, the Zuriberg on the east and the Uetliberg to the west. Between these two hills the land is pretty flat, for Switzerland anyway, and here almost a quarter of all the Swiss have congregated to make a compact handsome city. Those lucky enough to live on the rise of the Zuriberg often think they have the best location, with a view over the roofs of the downtown, and out to the big lake to the south, and sometimes a glimpse of the Alps. In the late afternoon sun a sense of luminous calm can radiate up from this mixed vista of human and natural features. A good place. Visitors often call it boring, but the locals don’t complain.

  At the Kirche Fluntern tram stop, about halfway up the Zuriberg, you can get off one of the blue trams and walk north along Hochstrasse, past an old church with a steeple that has a big clockface on it, with a bell that rings the hours. Next door to it is where one finds the offices of the Paris Agreement’s Ministry for the Future. They’re within easy walking distance of the ETH, with all its geotechnical expertise, and not far above offices of the big Swiss banks, with their immense amounts of capital, all out of proportion to Switzerland’s small size. These proximities were not accidental; for centuries now the Swiss have pursued a national policy of creating maximum safety for Switzerland by helping to increase peace and prosperity worldwide. “No one is safe until all are secure” seems to be their principle here, and in that project, geotechnical expertise and lots of money are both very useful.