The Ministry for the Future Read online

  That being the case, and since Geneva already hosted the headquarters of the World Health Organization and several other UN agencies, when the Paris Agreement established this new agency of theirs, Zurich forcefully made the case that Geneva was already too crowded with agencies, and expensive as a result, and after some vigorous inter-cantonal tussling, they won the bid to host the new agency. Offering rent-free the compound on Hochstrasse, and several nearby ETH buildings as well, was no doubt one of many reasons their bid succeeded.

  Now the head of the ministry— Mary Murphy, an Irish woman of about forty-five years of age, ex–minister of foreign affairs in the government of the Irish Republic, and before that a union lawyer— walked into her office to find a crisis that didn’t surprise her one bit. Everyone had been transfixed with horror at the news of the deadly heat wave in India; there were sure to be immediate ramifications. Now the first of these had come.

  Her chief of staff, a short slight man named Badim Bahadur, followed Mary into her office saying, “You must have heard that the Indian government is beginning a solar radiation management action.”

  “Yes, I just saw it this morning,” she said. “Have they given us the details of their plan?”

  “They came half an hour ago. Our geoengineering people are saying that if they do it as planned, it will equate to about the same as the Pinatubo volcanic eruption of 1991. That lowered global temperature by about a degree Fahrenheit, for a year or two. That was from the sulfur dioxide in the ash cloud that the volcano shot into the stratosphere. It will take the Indians several months to replicate that boost of sulfur dioxide, our people say.”

  “Do they have the capacity to do it?”

  “Their air force can probably do it, yes. They can certainly try, they’ve got the necessary aircraft and equipment. A lot of it will simply reconfigure aerial refueling technology. And planes dump fuel all the time, so that part won’t be so hard. The main problem will be getting up as high as possible, and then it’s just a matter of quantity, the number of missions needed. Thousands of flights, for sure.”

  Mary pulled her phone from her pocket, tapped the screen for Chandra. Head of India’s delegation to the Paris Agreement, she was well known to Mary. It would be late in Delhi, but this was when they usually talked.

  When she answered, Mary said, “Chandra, it’s Mary, can you talk for a minute?”

  “For a minute, yes,” Chandra said. “It’s very busy here.”

  “I’m sure. What’s this about your air force doing a Pinatubo?”

  “Or a double Pinatubo, yes. This is what our academy of sciences is recommending, and the prime minister has ordered it.”

  “But the Agreement,” Mary said, sitting down on her chair and focusing on her colleague’s voice. “You know what it says. No atmospheric interventions without consultation and agreement.”

  “We are breaking the Agreement,” Chandra said flatly.

  “But no one knows what the effects will be!”

  “They will be like Pinatubo, or hopefully double that. Which is what we need.”

  “You can’t be sure that there won’t be other effects—”

  “Mary!” Chandra exclaimed. “Stop it right now. I know what you are going to say even before you say it. Here’s what we are sure of in India: millions of people have just died. We’ll never even know how many died, there are too many to count. It could be twenty million people. Do you understand what that means?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. You don’t understand. I invite you to come see it in person. Really you should, just so you know.”

  Mary found herself short of breath. She swallowed. “I will if you want me to.”

  A long silence followed. Finally Chandra spoke, her voice tight and choked. “Thank you for that, but maybe there is too much trouble here now for us to handle such a visit. You can see in the reports. I will send you some we are making. What you need to know now is that we are scared here, and angry too. It was Europe and America and China who caused this heat wave, not us. I know we have burned a lot of coal in the last few decades, but it’s nothing compared to the West. And yet we signed the Agreement to do our part. Which we have done. But no one else is fulfilling commitments, no one is paying the developing nations, and now we have this heat wave. And another one could happen next week! Conditions are much the same!”

  “I know.”

  “Yes, you know. Everyone knows, but no one acts. So we are taking matters into our own hands. We’ll lower global temperatures for a few years, everyone will benefit. And perhaps we’ll dodge another massacre like this one.”

  “All right.”

  “We do not need your permission!” Chandra shouted.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Mary said. But the line had gone dead.

  5

  We drove in with a fuel truck, water truck, all that. It was like going out into nothing. With the electricity out, pumps weren’t working, nothing was working. We set to work on the power plants before we did anything about all the dead. In any case there was nothing we could do about them, the bodies were sleeping where they fell. This wasn’t just the people, but all the cattle too. Seeing all the bodies, cows, people, dogs, someone said something about the way Tibetans bury their dead, called sky burial— let the vultures eat the bodies. And there were some vultures doing that, yes. Clouds of vultures and crows. They must have flown in afterward. Sometimes the stink was horrible, but then we would move on or the wind would shift, and it went away. It seemed like it was too hot for smells, the air was cooked. The main smell was of burning. And things were burning, yes. Once the power came back on, there were some downed lines east of Lucknow, and brush fires started from them. Next day a wind came and the fire spread and got into the towns and we had to fight the fire before anything else. We got particulate readings of 1500 ppm.

  There was a lake we could pump from, next to one town near Lucknow. The lake was filled with dead bodies, it was awful, but we threw the pump intake out into the lake anyway, because we needed the water. We were downwind of a brush fire, it was coming at us fast. So when the pump started filling our water trucks we were relieved.

  Then I heard a noise, at first I thought it was something in the pump line, a kind of squeak it was. But then it seemed to be coming from the lakeshore, where there was a sidewalk running around the edge of the water. So I went over to look. I don’t know. I guess it sounded alive.

  He was lying against a building across the sidewalk from the lake. He had a shirt draped over his head. I saw him move and shouted to the others and went to him. He was a firangi, with brown hair and skin that was all peeling off. He looked like he had been burned, or boiled, I don’t know— he looked dead but he was moving. His eyes were almost swollen shut, but I could see he was looking at me. Once we started helping him he never said a thing, never made another sound. His lips were cracked bloody. I thought maybe his voice was gone, that he was too cooked to talk. We gave him water by the spoonful. We were afraid to give him too much at once. Once we got the word to team command, the medicos were with us pretty quickly. They took over and gave him infusions. He watched them do it. He looked around at us, and back at the lake, but he never said a thing. His eyes were just slits, and so red. He looked completely mad. Like a different kind of being entirely.

  6

  Following the great Indian heat wave, the emergency meeting of the Paris Agreement signatories was fraught indeed. The Indian delegation arrived in force, and their leader Chandra Mukajee was excoriating in her denunciation of the international community and its almost complete failure to adhere to the terms of the agreement that every nation on Earth had signed. Reductions in emissions ignored, payment into investment funds that were to be spent on decarbonization not paid— in every way the Agreement had been ignored and abrogated. A performance without substance, a joke, a lie. And now India had paid the price. More people had died in this heat wave than in the entirety of the First World War, and all in a single wee
k and in a single region of the world. The stain of such a crime would never go away, it would remain forever.

  No one had the heart to point out that India had also failed to meet its emission reduction targets. And of course if total emissions over historical time were totted up, India would come in far behind all of the developed nations of the Western world, as everyone knew. In dealing with the poverty that still plagued so much of the Indian populace, the Indian government had had to create electricity as fast as they could, and also, since they existed in a world run by the market, as cheaply as they could. Otherwise outside investors would not invest, because the rate of return would not be high enough. So they had burned coal, yes. Like everyone else had up until just a few years before. Now India was being told not to burn coal, when everyone else had finished burning enough of it to build up the capital to afford to shift to cleaner sources of power. India had been told to get better without any financial help to do so whatsoever. Told to tighten the belt and embrace austerity, and be the working class for the bourgeoisie of the developed world, and suffer in silence until better times came— but the better times could never come, that plan was shot. The deck had been stacked, the game was over. And now twenty million people were dead.

  The people in the big room in the center of Zurich’s Kongresshall sat there in silence. This was not the same silence as the earlier memorial moment, a ritual period of silence to honor the memory of the dead which had stretched on for minute after minute. Now it was the silence of shame, confusion, dismay, guilt. The Indian delegation was done talking, they had nothing more they cared to say. Time for a response, an answer to them; but there was no answer. Nothing could be said. It was what it was: history, the nightmare from which they could not wake.

  Finally that year’s president of the Paris Agreement organization, a woman from Zimbabwe, stood up and went to the podium. Briefly she embraced Chandra, nodded to the other Indians on stage, and went to the microphone.

  “Obviously we have to do better,” she said. “The Paris Agreement was created to avoid tragedies like this one. We are all in a single global village now. We share the same air and water, and so this disaster has happened to all of us. Since we can’t undo it, we have to turn it to the good somehow, or two things will happen; the crimes in it will go unatoned, and more such disasters will happen. So we have to act. At long last, we have to take the climate situation seriously, as the reality that overrides everything else. We have to act on what we know.”

  Everyone nodded. They could not applaud, not now, but they could nod. They could raise their hands, some of them with their fists clenched, and commit themselves to action.

  That was all very well. It was a moment, maybe even a moment to remember. But very soon they were back to the usual horse-trading of national interests and commitments. The disaster had happened in India, in a part of India where few foreigners ever went, a place said to be very hot, very crowded, very poor. Probably more such events in the future would mostly happen in those nations located between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, and the latitudes just to the north and south of these lines. Between thirty north and thirty south: meaning the poorest parts of the world. North and south of these latitudes, fatal heat waves might occur from time to time, but not so frequently, and not so fatally. So this was in some senses a regional problem. And every place had its regional problems. So when the funerals and the gestures of deep sympathy were done with, many people around the world, and their governments, went back to business as usual. And all around the world, the CO2 emissions continued.

  For a while, therefore, it looked like the great heat wave would be like mass shootings in the United States— mourned by all, deplored by all, and then immediately forgotten or superseded by the next one, until they came in a daily drumbeat and became the new normal. It looked quite possible that the same thing would happen with this event, the worst week in human history. How long would that stay true, about being the worst week? And what could anyone do about it? Easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism: the old saying had grown teeth and was taking on a literal, vicious accuracy.

  But not in India. Elections were held and the nationalist nativist BJP party was thrown out of office as insufficient to the task, and partly responsible for the disaster, having sold the country to outside interests and burned coal and trashed the landscape in the pursuit of ever-growing inequality. The RSS disgraced and discredited at last as an evil force in Indian life. A new party was voted in, a composite party composed of all kinds of Indians, every religion and caste, urban poor, rural poor, the educated, all banded together by the disaster and determined to make something change. The ruling elite lost legitimacy and hegemony, and the inchoate fractured resistance of victims coalesced in a party called Avasthana, Sanskrit for survival. The world’s biggest democracy, taking a new way. India’s electrical power companies were nationalized where they weren’t already, and a vast force was put to work shutting down coal-fired power plants and building wind and solar plants, and free-river hydro, and non-battery electrical storage systems to supplement the growing power of battery storage. All kinds of things began to change. Efforts were renewed to dismantle the worst effects of the caste system— these efforts had been made before, but now it was made a national priority, the new reality, and enough Indians were now ready to work for it. All over India, governments at all levels began to implement these changes.

  Lastly, though this was regretted by many, some more radical portion of this new Indian polity sent a message out to the world: change with us, change now, or suffer the wrath of Kali. No more cheap Indian labor, no more sell-out deals; no deals of any kind, unless changes were made. If changes weren’t made by the countries that had signed the Paris Agreement— and every nation had signed it— then this portion of India was now their enemy, and would break off diplomatic relations and do everything short of declaring military war. But economic war— yes, economic war. The world would see what this particular one-sixth of its population, formerly the working class for the world, could do. Time for the long post-colonial subalternity to end. Time for India to step onto the world stage, as it had at the start of history, and demand a better world. And then help to make it real.

  Whether that kind of aggressive stance would be revealed as a true national position or the posturing of a radical faction remained to be seen. It depended, some thought, on how far India’s new national government was willing to go to back up this Kali group’s threats— to in effect unleash them. War in the age of the internet, the age of the global village, the age of drones, the age of synthetic biology and artificial pandemics— this was not the same as war in the past. If they were serious, it could get ugly. In fact, if even just the Kali faction of the Indian polity was serious, it could get very ugly.

  But two could play at those games, indeed everyone could play those games— not just the 195 nations that had signed the Paris Agreement, but all the various kinds of non-state actors, right down to individuals.

  And so came a time of troubles.

  7

  He was having panic attacks whenever he got hot, and then the panic attacks made him hotter still. Feedback loop for sure. When he was stabilized enough to move him, we flew him to Glasgow. He had spent a year abroad there, he said, and we thought that familiarity might help. He didn’t want to go home to the States. So we took him to Glasgow and kept him cool, and took walks with him around the neighborhood at night. It was October and so the usual rain and raw sea air. That seemed to comfort him.

  One night I was out there walking the streets with him, letting him take the lead. He hardly ever said a word, and I let him be. On this night he was a little more talkative. He pointed out to me where he had gone to school, theaters he had frequented. Apparently he had taken an interest in theater, done some work backstage with lighting and sets and costumes. Then when we found ourselves on Clyde Street, he wanted to walk out onto the pedestrian bridge that ran out over the r
iver to the south bank.

  Out there in the dark the city looked foursquare and massive. It’s low for a city, not much different than it must have appeared a century or two ago. A little uncanny somehow, like a city in some dark fantasy. He stood there and looked down at the black water, elbows on the railing.

  We talked about various things. At one point I asked him again if he would be going home.

  No, he said sharply. I’m never going back there. It was the blackest look I ever saw on him. Never, he said.

  I let it go. I didn’t want to ask. We stood there leaning against the railing. It looked like the city was slowly floating in toward the hills.

  So why did I survive? he said all of a sudden. Why just me, out of all those people?

  I didn’t know what to say. You just did, I said. Probably you were the healthiest person there. Maybe one of the biggest, I don’t know. You aren’t that big, but maybe bigger than most Indians.

  He shrugged. Not really.

  Even a bit more body mass would help. You have to keep your core temperature under about 104. A few pounds could help with that. And a lifetime of better food and medical care. And you’re a runner, right?