“I know. We’ll have to see what our scientists say about it first.”
He gave her a look. “They will prevaricate.”
“Well, they don’t know enough now to make a considered judgment. So they’ll say it’s a good experiment, that we should run it and wait a decade and see what happens.”
“As usual!”
“But that’s science, right?”
“But we have to do more than the usual!”
“We’ll say that. And I’m sure we’ll end up backing India.”
“With money?”
“Ten euros, sure! Cash on the barrel.”
He laughed despite himself. But quickly his expression darkened.
“It isn’t enough,” he said. “What we’re doing with this ministry. I’m telling you, it isn’t enough.”
Mary regarded him closely. This was a reproach. And he wasn’t meeting her eye.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she suggested. “I’ve been sitting all day.”
He didn’t object. They polished off their drinks, paid and walked out into the twilight. Down to the crane statue and then upstream by the Limmat in its stone channel, the black surface of water sheeting past them, cracking the light reflected from the other side. Past the old stone cube of the Rathaus; as always, Mary marvelled that the entire city government could have been stuffed into such a small building. Then past the Odeon and across the big bridge spanning the lake outlet, to the tiny park on the other side, where the statue of Ganymede stood, his uplifted hand seeming to hold up the moon, low over the Zurichsee. This was a place she often came to; something in the statue, the lake, the Alps far to the south, combined in a way she found stirring, she couldn’t say why. Zurich— life— she couldn’t say. The world seemed a big place when she was here.
“Listen,” she said to Badim. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s no such thing as justice, in the sense of some kind of real reparation of a wrong. No eye for an eye, no matter what. Especially historical justice, or climate justice. But over the long haul, in some rough sense, that’s what we have to try for. That’s what our ministry is about. We’re trying to set things up so that in the future, over the long haul, something like justice will get created. Some long-term ledger of more good than bad. Bending the arc and all that. No matter what happened before, that’s what we can do now.”
She pointed at Ganymede, holding his back hand aloft. The moon lay right there in it, as if he were about to throw it across the sky.
Badim sighed. “I know,” he said. “I’m here to try.” And the look in his eye— distant, intense, calculating, cold— told Mary that he would. It made her shiver to see it.
More relaxing for Mary, even entertaining, were her meetings with Tatiana Voznesenskaya, head of the ministry’s legal division. They were in the habit of meeting on some mornings at the Utoquai schwimmbad, and if it was warm enough, changing into their bathing suits and swimming out into the lake, freestyling in tandem and then chatting as they did the breaststroke for a while, circling out there, looking at the city from that strange low offshore angle; then back in to shower and sit in the schwimmbad café over hot drinks. Tatiana was tall and dark, dramatic in that Russian way of pale blue eyes and fashion model cheekbones, of grim high spirits and fuligin black humor. She had gotten pretty high in the Russian state department before running afoul of some part of the power structure there and deciding she would be better off in an international agency. Her expertise in Russia had been international treaty law, which she now brought to bear in working to find allies and legal means to advance the cause of defending the generations to come. This she felt was mostly a matter of establishing situations where these generations to come were given legal standing, such that their currently existing lawyers could file suits and be heard by courts. Not easy, given the reluctance of any court to grant standing to anyone or anything outside the magic circle of the law as written. But Tatiana had experience with most of the already-existing international courts, and was now working with the Network of Institutions for Future Generations, and the Children’s Trust, and many other groups, all to leverage the power given to the ministry by its origins in the Paris Agreement. Mary often felt that it was really Tatiana who should have been made the head of the ministry, that Mary’s experience in Ireland and the UN had been rather lightweight compared to Tatiana’s tough career.
Tatiana had waved this off when Mary once mentioned the thought over drinks. “No you are perfect! Nice Irish girl, everyone loves you! I would wreck everything at once, bashing around like a KGB thug. Which I am,” she added with a dangerous glint in her eye.
“Not really,” Mary said.
“No, not really. But I would wreck things. We need you at the top, getting us in the door. It’s similar to legal standing, really. Less formal but just as important. You have to get people to listen to you before you can make your case. That’s what you do— people listen to you. Then we can go to work.”
“I hope so. Do you really think we can get significant legal standing for people who don’t exist yet?”
“I’m not sure. On the one hand, the circle of inclusion has been growing over historical time, which is a kind of precedent. More kinds of people given standing, even ecologies given standing, as in Ecuador. It sets a pattern, and logically it holds water. But even if we succeed in that part, we have a second problem, maybe bigger, in the weakness of international courts generally.”
“Do you think they’re weak?”
Tatiana gave Mary a sharp look, as if to say Please be serious. “Nations agree to them only if they like their
