Ice Ages were tough for humans. But from Gaia’s point of view, if you give up the higher latitudes to ice, you lose a percentage of your productive surface, but you reflect away a hell of a lot of sunlight. Meanwhile life can flourish in the cooled-down mid-latitudes, and indeed on the land surface exposed by the lower sea levels. And the oceans are more fecund when the water is cooler; Gaia likes it cool. So the mechanism worked. But it always looked like a last-gasp effort.
“And now suddenly Gaia is finding herself water-rich, very hot, with very high carbon dioxide levels. She’s under stress again, a kind of stress possibly unprecedented in her history.”
“That’s what Thandie says. Stress-”
“Yes, but we know the Earth likes to settle in stable states, where all its geological, climatic and biological cycles work together. For the last couple of million years it’s flickered between Ice Age and warm interglacial. Now I think Gaia is reaching for a new stasis, a new point of equilibrium, where we’ll see a much higher level of carbon dioxide in the air, and a much higher global temperature. All that heat will generate storms and whip up the sea, promoting life there by stirring up the nutrients, and providing a drawdown mechanism for the carbon dioxide. So you’ll get a stable state, though with a higher cee-oh-two level than before.”
“I see. I think. No need for land at all?”
“No. A whole new stable equilibrium, on a hot, stormy, watery Earth. In a sense you could say this is why the deep subsurface reservoirs have opened up now, to release the water to make this new state possible; the old states, the glacial-interglacial, were on the point of failure. You know what? I did some calculations, just blue-sky stuff. I figure that with a configuration like that there could be more total biomass on the Earth than before. The planet will come out of this actually healthier.”
“But without room for us,” she said.
“Not necessarily. There’ll be plenty of fish in the sea, if we’ve the wit to catch them. But this whole story has never been about us, has it? It’s always been about the Earth, transforming herself as she has in the past. Even if we gave her the kick in the ass that induced her to start the process.”
Lily looked at the children playing in the sea. “Our civilization is gone. Everything we built. But look at those kids swimming. They don’t care that the Smithsonian is drowned, or that we’re all offline forever.”
Gary murmured, “Yes. And even if we pass away, you know, it’s a happy ending of a kind. ‘One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the Earth abideth for ever.’ Ecclesiastes 1:4.” He grinned. “It was Thandie got me looking up the Bible, but don’t tell her that either.”
“So what about you? When North America drowns, will you come with us?”
“I guess not,” he said, as boyishly as if he was refusing nothing more than a second cup of water. “I think I’m done with traveling. And there are people back there I care about.”
Lily smiled. “You always were a people person, in the end. If not for you, Grace couldn’t have survived. But I can’t see you quitting. You’re only fifty-six. I’ll give you some of Nathan’s raft-seaweed to grow.”
“Thanks.” He seemed concerned. “But, Lily, look, the seaweed by itself isn’t enough. Eventually you’ll run out of other stuff. The plastic, nylon fishing lines, everything else.”
“Oh, we know the rafts don’t last forever. Every so often we get hit by a storm we can’t avoid, and a few more are lost. And there are still pirates out there. It’s a steady attrition.”
“And doesn’t that worry you?”
She shrugged. “What can we do about it?”
“It’s a tragedy, you know,” Gary said. “We just ran out of time.” He looked up at the huge sky.“Another fifty years and we’d have had power stations in orbit, and mines on the asteroids and the moon, and we wouldn’t need the damn continents. Well.”
“Yes.”
They stood, helping each other up. Arm in arm, they walked to the edge of the raft, where Gary’s friend was waiting beside their rowboat. He was playing coin tricks for a shoal of children, some of them in the water, some out of it. They looked enchanted.
Gary said to Lily, “I know where you’re heading next.”
“You do, do you?”
“There’s only one place to be, in the end, isn’t there, one last sight to see? You’ve got time, a few years left yet.” He hugged her once more, and clambered down into his boat. They pulled on their oars and the boat slid away. “You just know she’s going to be there.”
“Who?”
He had to call back from the boat. “The disaster tourist’s disaster tourist. Thandie Jones! Give her my love when you see her.”
The boat receded, heading back toward the near-submerged Rockies. The raft children splashed and played in its wake, begging for coins. Lily heard Ana’s thin voice calling for little Boris to come in.
96
May 2052
Boris was six years old now. And he wasn’t much interested in some lump of rock that stuck out of the ocean. You saw lumps like that all over, just sticking out. He’d never actually been on one. Why would you want to? It wasn’t a raft, it didn’t go anywhere, you couldn’t eat it, what use was it? The only unusual thing about this one was the flag on its pole on the summit, bright red, with a cute little gold design in the corner. But even that wasn’t very interesting.
But he had to show an interest, he was told by his father Manco, for Grannie Lily was interested in it. And, his father pointed, look, there were other people interested too. Other rafts had come to sail around the rock, a gathering on the sea, all of them strangers, approaching this place. If they were all coming here there must be something worth seeing, mustn’t there?
Lily sat in her chair, under her blanket, seventy-six years old, an age she called “impossible.” Mostly she slept. When she was awake she watched the rock approach, a dot of stern darkness against the sparkling ocean, and Boris listened dutifully as Grannie Lily told him about the strange days when the world had been all rock and hardly any sea, and nobody swam or ate fish, not unless they wanted to. In those days, she said, this particular rock had had various names, old ones like Chu-mu-lang-ma, and young names like Everest. And it was special because this would soon be the only rock left sticking out of the ocean, anywhere in the world.
That impressed Boris, just a flicker, but so what? Even when the rock was underwater you could always swim down to see it if you really wanted to. However he put up with being cuddled and patted and told he was a good boy in the hope of getting a treat, a bit of dried fish or a coin. And he liked old Lily too, he really did, and not just for the treats she gave him.
After a time she would fall asleep again, mumbling, drooling a bit, and Boris would stay with her, occasionally wiping the spittle from her mouth.
Another raft approached, bigger than theirs, buoyed up by fat black tires, a ragged sail fluttering.
The people on this raft were dressed in the same faded blue coveralls Grannie Lily always wore. But Boris was a lot more interested in the kids he saw playing on the other raft. They had a tire hung up on a rope; you could climb on this thing, and swing on it, or even climb through it and sort of swim in the air.
Some of the people hopped over from the other raft and came up to Lily. They bent over her, and smiled.
Lily stirred, and flinched from the circle of faces. “?Como se llama usted??Me puede ayudar, por favor? Me llamo-”
“Lily. Lily, it’s OK. It’s me.”
Lily opened her eyes, squinting. “Thandie? Thandie Jones… And Elena, it’s lovely to see you. I was always so glad you two found each other. Never easy to find somebody in this world of ours, I know. You come from that submarine?”
“The New Jersey? No, ma’am. We were evicted when factions from the federal government took it over, in the final evacuation. Congress-men with their wives, children and mistresses. Now we’re rafting, as you are. And what became of the New Jersey I’ve no idea.”
