“I went back to India,” he said. “I tried to join a group of people I had heard about. Children of Kali, you’ve heard of them?”
“Yes. But they’re a terrorist group.”
He shook his head, staring at her all the while. “No. You have to stop thinking with your old bourgeois values. That time has passed. The stakes are too high for you to hide behind them anymore. They’re killing the world. People, animals, everything. We’re in a mass extinction event, and there are people trying to do something about it. You call them terrorists, but it’s the people you work for who are the terrorists. How can you not see that?”
“I’m trying to avoid violence,” Mary said. “That’s my job.”
“I thought you said your job was to avoid a mass extinction event!”
“Did I say that?”
“I don’t know, what did you say? What do you say now! Don’t split hairs with me, I’m not here for hair-splitting! You’re killing the world and you want me to remember what words you used to cover your ass? You tell me now! What is your job as head of the Ministry for the fucking Future?”
She swallowed hard. Took a sip of tea. It was cool. She tried to think what to say. Was it wise to try to talk things over with this distraught young man, who was getting angrier by the moment? Did she have any other choice than to do so?
She said, “The ministry was set up after the Paris meeting of 2024. They thought it would be a good idea to create an agency tasked with representing the interests of the generations to come. And the interests of those entities that can never speak for themselves, like animals and watersheds.”
The young man gestured dismissively. This was boilerplate, known to him already. “And so? How do you do that, how do you defend those interests?”
“We’ve made divisions that focus on various aspects of the problem. Legal, financial, physical, and so forth. We prioritize what we do to portion out the budget we’re given, and we do what we can.”
He stared at her. “What if that’s not enough?”
“What do you mean, not enough?”
“It’s not enough. Your efforts aren’t slowing the damage fast enough. They aren’t creating fixes fast enough. You can see that, because everyone can see it. Things don’t change, we’re still on track for a mass extinction event, we’re in the extinctions already. That’s what I mean by not enough. So why don’t you do something more?”
“We’re doing everything we can think of.”
“But that either means you can’t think of obvious things, or you have thought of them and you won’t do them.”
“Like what?”
“Like identifying the worst criminals in the extinction event and going after them.”
“We do that.”
“With lawsuits?”
“Yes, with lawsuits, and sanctions, and publicity campaigns, and—”
“What about targeted assassinations?”
“Of course not.”
“Why of course? Some of these people are committing crimes that will end up killing millions! They spend their entire lives working hard to perpetuate a system that will end in mass death.”
“Violence begets violence,” Mary said. “It cycles forever. So here we are.”
“Having lost the battle. But look, the violence of carbon burning kills many more people than any punishment for capital crimes ever would. So really your morality is just a kind of surrender.”
She shrugged. “I believe in the rule of law.”
“Which would be fine, if the laws were just. But in fact they’re allowing the very violence you’re so opposed to!”
“Then we have to change the laws.”
“What about violence against the carbon burning itself? Would bombing a coal plant be too violent for you?”
“We work within the law. I think that gives us a better chance of changing things.”
“But it isn’t working fast enough.” He tried to compose himself. “If you took your job seriously, you’d be looking into how to make change happen faster. Some things might be against the law, but in that case the law is wrong. I think the principle was set at Nuremberg— you’re wrong to obey orders that are wrong.”
Mary sighed. “A lot of our work these days goes to trying to point out the problems created by the currently existing legal regime, and recommending corrections.”
“But it isn’t working.”
She shrugged unhappily, looking away. “It’s a process.”
He shook his head. “If you were serious, you’d have a black wing, doing things outside the law to accelerate the changes.”
“If it was a black wing, then I wouldn’t tell you about it.”
He stared at her. Finally he shook his head. “I don’t think you have one. And if you do, it isn’t doing its job. There are about a hundred people walking this Earth, who if you judge from the angle of the future like you’re supposed to do, they are mass murderers. If they started to die, if a number of them were killed, then the others might get nervous and change their ways.”
She shook her head. “Murder breeds murder.”
“Exile, then. Prisons that you contrive, on your own recognizance. What if they woke up one day with no assets? Their ability to murder the future would be much reduced.”
“I don’t know.”
“If you don’t do it, others will.”
“Maybe they should. They do their part, we do ours.”
“But yours isn’t working. And if they do it, they get killed for it. Whereas you would just be doing your job.”
“That wouldn’t justify it.”
“So you keep it in the black zone! A lot of the world’s history is now happening in the dark. You must know that. If you don’t go there yourself, you’ve got no chance.”
She sipped her tea. “I don’t know,” she said.
“But you’re not trying to know! You’re trying not to know!”
She sipped her tea.
Abruptly he stood again. He could barely hold himself still, now; he twitched, he turned this way and that, took a step and stopped. He looked around as if he had forgotten where they were.
“What’s the
