The Ministry for the Future

100

She took an overnight train to Montpellier, slept the sleep of the blessed. Her ship left that evening, so that day she wandered the city’s big old plaza, then the line of new Doric columns running from the plaza toward the harbor. Then onto an ocean clipper, sleek, seven-masted, looking like a cross between a schooner and a rocket ship laid on its side. On board to sleep again.

When she woke they were at sea. Every surface of this ship was photovoltaic or piezoelectric or both. Its passage through the waves, its very existence in the sun, generated power which got sent to the props. With a good wind filling the big sails, and the kites pulling from far overhead, tethered to the bow, they could fly on the thing’s hydroplanes. A hundred kilometers an hour felt really fast.

Next morning they surged through the Pillars of Hercules and out into the Atlantic. Some vague memory of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” a kind of Victorian-Homeric ode to retirement: To live, to fight, to strive, to something, and not to yield. Brit love of heroic death; charge of the Light Brigade, Scott in Antarctica, World War One. A sentimentalism very far from Irish, although the Irish had their own sentimentalities, God knew. Into the open sea, leave behind the sight of land.

The blue plate of the ocean. Sea and sky, clouds. Pink at dawn, orange at sunset. Winds pushing and pulling them, the sun, the waves. The glorious glide, crest to trough, trough to crest, long rollers of mid-ocean. How had they forgotten this? She recalled her last flight from London to San Francisco, passing over Greenland at midday, no clouds below them, the great ice expanse as alien as Callisto or Titan, and everyone with their window shades pulled down so they could watch their movies. She had looked out her window and then around at her fellow passengers, feeling they were doomed. They were too stupid to live. Darwin Prize, grand winner. The road to dusty death.

Here, now, she stood at the taffrail of a seven-masted schooner, a craft that could maybe be sailed solo, or by the ship’s AI. AI-assisted design was continuously working up better ships, as with everything, and solutions were sometimes as counterintuitive as could be (kites? masts curving forward?), but of course human intuition was so often wrong. Foxing their own cognitive errors might be one of the greatest accomplishments of contemporary science, if they could really do it. As with everything, if they could get through this tight spot, they might sail right off into something grand.

A stop at Havana, handsome seaside city. Beautiful monument to the communist idea. Then to Panama, through the canal and up the sunny Pacific to San Francisco. They sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge on a cold cloudy day, the marine layer so low that the orange bridge was invisible, like a return to the bridgeless time. Then into their appointed wharf and onto land again, feeling its unsteady steadiness. Walking in hilly San Francisco, the most beautiful city in the world. Time for a last bit of work.

She had agreed to Badim’s request to represent them one last time at the CCCB. They met again at the top of the Big Tower, and again Mary was distracted by the city below, and Mount Tamalpais, and the Farallons poking blackly over the western horizon.

Most of the same people were there, including the Chinese finance minister. Again Mary found her cheerful and articulate. One of the most powerful people in China. Hoping, she said when introduced, to find more that could be done to crank the Great Turn. Dynastic succession for the whole world, she suggested with a smile.

Jane Yablonski asked her what she had in mind.

Chan spoke of equity, getting better in China and the world, but still far from achieved. She spoke of income floors and ceilings, of land taxes and habitat corridors. Of the world as a commons, one ecosphere, one planet, a living thing they were all part of. Looking at the central bankers listening attentively to her, Mary saw it again; these people were as close to rulers of the world as existed. If they were now using their power to protect the biosphere and increase equity, the world could very well tack onto a new heading and take a good course. Bankers! It was enough to make her laugh, or cry. And yet by their own criteria, so pinched and narrow, they were doing the necessary things. They were securing money’s value, they still told themselves; which in this moment of history required that the world get saved.

She had to smile, she couldn’t help it. Saved by fucking bankers. Of course the whole world was making them do it. Now they were discussing other new ideas, experiments beyond anything she had ever dreamed of. Minister Chan was now smiling, sweetly but slyly—it seemed because she had looked over at Mary and seen Mary’s little smile. The two of them were complicit in their amusement; both were amused that Chan herself would be taking the helm here, and heading off in new directions. It was so amusing that when someone asked Mary what she and her ministry might think of all these new ideas for reform that Madame Chan was proposing to them, Mary stood to extend her hand toward the young Chinese woman, and smile at her, and say, I yield the floor, I pass the torch, I like all of these ideas. I say, be as bold as you can dare to be!