The great shock of their arrival was to see that the ocean, clear of ice to the northern horizon, was yellow. Naturally this looked awful, like some vast toxic spill; in fact it was geoengineering, no doubt the most visible act of geoengineering ever, and as such widely reviled. But the solar heating of the Arctic Ocean when there was no ice covering it might be enough all by itself to tip the world irrevocably into jungle planet. All the models were in agreement on this, so the decision to try to forestall that result had been made according to Paris Agreement protocols, and the color dye released. Yellow water didn’t allow sunlight to penetrate it, and even bounced some sunlight back into space. Relatively small quantities of dye could color a large area of ocean. Both the artificial and natural dyes they were using broke down over a summer season, and could be renewed or not the following year. Petroleum-based dyes were cheap to manufacture, and only mildly carcinogenic; natural dyes, made of oak and mulberry bark, were non-petroleum-based, and only a little bit poisonous. The two could be alternated as they learned more about them. The energy and heat savings in terms of albedo were huge— the albedo went from 0.06 for open water (where 1 was total reflection and 0 total absorption) to 0.47 for yellow water. The amount of energy thus bounced back out into space was simply stupendous, the benefit-to-cost ratio off the charts.
Geoengineering? Yes. Ugly? Very much so. Dangerous? Possibly.
Necessary? Yes. Or put it this way; the international community had decided through their international treaty system to do it. Yet another intervention, yet another experiment in managing the Earth system, in finessing Gaia. Geobegging.
Mary looked down at the ungodly sight from the airship’s gondola and sighed. It was a funny world. “Why did you bring us up here?” she asked Art. “Was it to see this?”
He shook his head, looking mildly shocked at the suggestion. “For the animals,” he said. “As always.”
And a few hours later they were flying over a herd of caribou that covered the tundra from horizon to horizon. Art admitted he had brought the airship down to the right altitude to create this effect; they were about five hundred feet above the ground. From this height there seemed to be millions of animals, covering the whole world. These were migrating west, in loose lines like banners or ribbons, which bunched whenever they were crossing a stream. It was stunning to see.
South over Greenland.
As they flew they saw a lot of other airships. Giant robot freighters, circular sky villages under rings of balloons, actual clippers of the clouds sporting sails or pulled by kites, hot-air balloons in their usual rainbow array. There had not yet been any regularization of shapes and sizes; Art said they were still in the Cambrian explosion moment of airship design. Many people were moving up into the sky, and traffic lanes and altitudes had been established, as with jets in the old days. Airspace was humanized and therefore also bureaucratized. And carbon neutral.
As they flew, Mary spent more and more time listening to Art talk to his passengers, his clients or guests or customers. He had lived most of his life on this airship, he told them. He was about sixty, Mary reckoned, so the “most of his life” seemed a bit premature, a statement of intent as much as a history. She liked him. A slight man, angular face, hooked nose, balding. Startling pale eyes, a distinguished look, a sweet shy smile. He looked like the photo of Joyce Cary that her father had kept on his bookshelf, next to a row of Cary’s novels. Despite his job as ship captain and chief naturalist, he seemed to her a shy man. He spoke mostly of animals and geography. Which given their position made sense, but days passed and she never learned a thing about him except what she might deduce. Irish; eventually, she even had to ask, she learned he was from Belfast, his dad Protestant, mother Catholic.
Something had sent him aloft, she thought as she watched him. It had been an escape, perhaps. A refuge. An ascension into solitude. Then, after years had passed, perhaps, he had gotten lonely, and begun running these tour cruises. This was her theory. Now he liked to share the pleasures of his life aloft, and he gained some company by it, some conversation. And he had an expertise he could teach to people, the various joys and fascinations of a bird’s life. An Arctic tern he was, back and forth, pole to pole. A few years before he had hired an events coordinator in London, who booked his tours and helped him arrange their various ports of call.
So: nature cruise. Mary was still very dubious. It was not her kind of thing. She doubted she would do it again. Still, for now, the other passengers were pleasant; some Norwegians, a few Chinese, a family from Sri Lanka. They were all interested to see the world from the air, in particular the world’s animals.
Earth was big. At this height, at this speed, that immensity was becoming clearer and clearer. Of course scale was so variable. Pale blue dot, mote of dust in the sunlight, true enough; but from this vantage it was beyond enormous. You could walk your whole life and never cover more than a small fraction of it. Now they lofted like an eagle over it.
“We’re so stupid,” she said to Art one night.
He looked at her, startled. It was late, they were alone in the viewing room, the others had gone to bed. This had already happened once or twice before; it was beginning to look like a habit, a little conspiracy to chat.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Sure you do,” she replied. “Why else are you up here?”
Again he was startled. His other guests didn’t speak to him like this, she
