“You were lucky to want something.”
“I don’t know. Wanting something can make you unhappy. I was not happy. I lashed out.”
“Happiness is overrated. Is anyone ever really happy?”
“Oh, I think so. It looks like it, anyway.” He gestured around them.
Zurich, so solid and handsome. Were the Zurchers happy? Mary wasn’t sure. Swiss happiness was expressed by a little lift at the corners of the mouth, by thumping down a stein after a long swallow. Ah! Genau! Or by that little frown of displeasure that things were not better than they were. Mary liked the Swiss, their practicality anyway. Undemonstrative, stable, focused on reality. These were stereotypes, sure, and in the part of their lives hidden except to themselves, the Swiss were no doubt as melodramatic as opera stars. Italian soap opera stars, another stereotype of course, those were all they had once they started thinking about groups, they simplified to an image, and then that image could always be turned to the bad.
“I’m not so sure,” she said. “People who have it all, who don’t want anything, they’re lost. If you want something and your work gets you closer to it, that’s the only happiness.”
“The pursuit,” he said.
“Yes. The pursuit of happiness is the happiness.”
“Then we should be happy!”
“Yes,” she said unhappily. “But only if we get somewhere. If you’re pursuing something and you’re stuck, really stuck, then that’s not a pursuit anymore. That’s just being stuck.”
Badim nodded, regarding the great statue curiously.
Mary thought he had come down here to tell her something, surely; but he had not done that. She watched him for a while. Nepal had fallen to a Maoist insurrection that had killed thirteen thousand people over a period of about ten years. Some would call that a lot; others would say it wasn’t so many.
“I notice things happening out there,” she said to him. “Davos gets seized and the happy rich folk put through a reeducation camp. Glamping with Che. Then all those planes going down in one day.”
“We didn’t do that!” he said quickly. “That wasn’t us.”
“No? It killed the airline industry, more or less. That was ten percent of the carbon burn, gone in a single day.”
He shook his head, looking surprised she would even think such a thing. “I wouldn’t do that, Mary. If we had any such violent action in mind, I would confer with you. But really we’re not in that kind of business.”
“So, these so-called accidents happening to oil executives?”
“It’s a big world,” he said. Ah ha, Mary thought. He was trying not to look uneasy.
“So,” she said, “what did you come down here to discuss? Why did you find me and come down here?”
He looked at her. “I do have an idea,” he said. “I wanted to tell you.”
“Tell me.”
He looked off at the city for a while. Gray Zurich. “I think we need a new religion.”
She stared at him, surprised. “Really?”
He turned his gaze on her. “Well, maybe it’s not a new religion. An old religion. Maybe the oldest religion. But back among us, big time. Because I think we need it. People need something bigger than themselves. All these economic plans, always talking about things in terms of money and self-interest— people aren’t really like that. They’re always acting for other reasons than that. For other people, basically. For religious reasons. Spiritual reasons.”
Mary shook her head, unsure. She’d got enough of that kind of thing in her childhood. Ireland had not seemed to have benefited from its religion.
Badim saw this and wagged a finger at her. “It’s a huge part of the brain, you know. The temporal lobe pulses like a strobe light when you feel these emotions. Sense of awe— epilepsy— hypergraphia …”
“It’s not sounding that good,” Mary pointed out.
“I know, it can go wrong, but it’s crucial. It’s central to who you are, to how you decide things.”
“So you’re going to invent a new religion.”
“An old one. The oldest one. We’re going to bring it back. We need it.”
“And how are you going to do that?”
“Well, let me share some ideas with you.”
57
Next season I was back down there again, helping with the seawater pumping experiment, even though it was obvious to all of us that it was a crazy idea. Ten million wind power turbines? Thousands of pipelines? Not going to happen. It was a fantasy cure.
But someone had to try it. And the project had one more season of funding. So we got the pump intake back through the sea ice into the water. Then we followed the pipeline up the big white hill. It was laid right on the ground, because snow or ice was a better insulator than air, and warmer too. Still, a big part of the total energy budget was for heating the pipes to keep the water liquid on its way to its destination. The rest of the energy was simply to move the water uphill. And water is heavy, and Antarctica is high. So, whatever. An experiment or an exercise in futility, depending on your view.
There were people proposing to generate energy from ocean currents. The Antarctic Current runs around the continent like a belt, clockwise as seen from above, and of course it gets channelized through the Drake Passage; if electricity could be generated from that faster section of the current, great. But none of us thought it would work. The sea eats everything you put in it, and the size and number of turbines that could spin up enough electricity to do the job was off the charts.
Then there were those who still held the dream of space-based electricity. Russians for the most part. They had used their Molniya orbit for communications satellites for a long time— this being an almost polar orbit, in an elliptical shape that brings it close to Earth twice a day. So the Russians were putting up satellites with solar panels and microwave transmitters to send power down to Earth. Microwave collection stations were
