The Ministry for the Future

102

Meeting in San Francisco over, retired in full, Mary considered how best to get home to Zurich. There was no hurry. She looked into it online, and to her surprise found that Arthur Nolan, the airship pilot Frank had introduced to her in his co-op, was flying into San Francisco the following week, as part of a voyage around the world. This tour of his was headed to the Arctic, then down over Europe and the east side of Africa to Antarctica.

Mary contacted him and asked if she could join the trip, and he texted back and said yes, of course. Happy to have her.

On the airship they called him Captain Art. He met her on a pad on the side of Mount Tamalpais where his craft was tied to a mast, and ushered her up the jetway and along to the craft’s viewing chamber, which was located at the bow of the airship’s living quarters, a long gallery that extended under much of the length of the airship’s body, like a big keel. The gondola, they called it. A little group of passengers were already in this clear-walled and clear-floored room, eating appetizers and chatting. Nature cruise. Mary tried to keep an open mind about that, tried to remember names as she was introduced. About a dozen people, mostly Scandinavian.

At the end of the introductions, Captain Art told them they would stop next in a particular Sierra meadow, to see a wolverine that had been spotted, an animal he obviously considered special. They were happy to hear it.

Shortly thereafter they took off. This felt strange, lofting up over the bay, bouncing a little on the wind, not like a jet, not like a helicopter. Strange but interesting. Dynamic lift; the electric motors, on sidecars up the sides of the bag, could get them to about two hundred kilometers an hour over the land, depending on the winds.

East over the bay and that part of the city. Then the delta. It reminded Mary of the model of northern California that she had been shown long ago, but this time it was real, and vast. The delta an endless tule marsh below them, cut into patterns by lines of salt-tolerant trees, remnants of the old islands and channels. Blond-tipped green grasses, lines of trees, open water channels, the V wakes of a pair of animals swimming along—beavers, Art told them. The viewing chamber had spotting scopes, and what they showed when one looked through them was that the delta was dense with wildlife. Mostly unvisited by humans now, they were told. Part of California’s contribution to the Half Earth project. Mount Diablo, rising behind them to the southwest, gave them a sense of the size of the delta; it was immense. They could still just see the Farallons marking the sea on the western horizon; to the north stood the little black bump of Mount Shasta; to the south the coastal range walled the central valley on the right, the Sierra Nevada walled it on the left. Huge expanse of land. It looked like California would have an easy time meeting the Half Earth goal.

Over the central valley. Habitat corridors looked like wide hedgerows, separating giant rectangles of crops and orchards. A green and yellow checkerboard. Farther east hills erupted out of orchards; the first rise to the Sierra, now a dark wall ahead. The airship rose with the land, floating over wild oak forests and then evergreen forests, with steep-sided canyons etched deeply through the hills. Snow ahead on the highest peaks.

Art brought the airship down onto Tuolumne Meadows, a high expanse of snow and trees, punctuated by clean granite domes. The roads to it were still closed, they seemed to have it entirely to themselves. Along with a family of wolverines.

The airship attached itself to a mast sticking out of the snow near Lambert Dome. The two members of the crew maneuvered the craft down and secured it to anchor bollards. A ramp extended from a door in the side of the gondola, and they walked down into chill still air, onto hard white snow.

What do they eat in winter? the passengers asked Art, looking around at the white folds of snow, the steep granite faces; no obvious signs of food, unless you could eat pine trees. Did they hibernate?

They did not. They were fine in winter, Art told them. Dense fur, feet like snowshoes. In winter they ate little mammals dug up from under the snow, but mainly bigger creatures found dead. Carrion eaters. Not uncommon in winter to find creatures that had died.

They followed him over the hard snow. He was looking at his phone as he walked, his other hand balancing a spotting scope on a monopole over his shoulder. Then he stopped, phone extended to point. They all froze. From a knot of trees emerged three black creatures, galumping over the snow. They looked somewhat like dogs with very short legs. A mama and two kits, it appeared. Broad backs, reddish black fur. Bands of lighter fur around the sides of their bodies. The mother had a buff band across her forehead.

She stopped and suddenly began digging hard in the snow. Not far beyond them, a steaming hot springs had melted an open patch of ground, muddy and crusted at the edge with brown ice. Possibly a water hole in wintertime. Then the mama wolverine stuck her head in the hole she had dug and began to tug upward. Ah: a dead deer, buried under the snow near the spring. Patiently, with some more pawing and many hard tugs, the mother pulled it up out of the snow. Serious strength in that small body. She began to tear at the corpse, and her kits flopped around her trying to do the same.

One old name for the wolverine, Art said quietly as they watched, was the glutton. They always ate with great enthusiasm, it seemed, and usually tore their prey to bits and ate every part of it, including bones. They had a tooth at the back of their mouths that made it easier for them to tear flesh, and their jaws were so strong they could break any bone they came on. Gulo gulo was their Latin name, referencing this supposed gluttony.

“We’re lucky to see this,” Art said quietly. “Wolverines are still rare here. There weren’t any at all in the Sierra from about 1940 to the early 2000s. Then a few began to show up on night cameras near Lake Tahoe, but they were wanderers, and it didn’t look like there were any breeding pairs. Now they’re being seen all up and down the range. There were some re-introductions to help that along. Now it seems like they’re back.”

“Lots of deer up here?” Mary guessed.

“Sure. Like everywhere. Although at least here the deer have some predators. Mountain lions, coyotes.”

They settled in and shared time at the spotting scope. They watched the wolverine family eat. It was a somewhat grisly business. The kits were playful in the usual style of youngsters. This was their first year, Art said. Next year the mom would shoo them off. They weren’t graceful, being so low and foursquare. They reminded Mary of otters she had seen in zoos, the way otters moved on land; but otters were very graceful underwater. For wolverines, this was it. Not graceful. But of course this was a human perspective; they were also obviously capable, confident, happy on the snow. Unafraid. Wild creatures at home, back at home, after a century gone. Knitting up the world.

Mary moved away, stood watching. For a time she was distracted, thinking of Frank and the chamois and marmots. Then these animals brought her back. The kits harassed their mom, played in the usual style of the young. Such a deep part of what mammals were, playing when young. Did baby salamanders play? She couldn’t remember ever playing, her childhood was so far behind her—but no, there it was, she remembered. Kicking a ball in the yard and so on. Sure.

Then also the careless tolerance of the mom, ignoring her youngsters as they clambered on her, wrestled with each other, fell over themselves. They snuffed and worried at her underside, she knocked them away with a flick of her foreleg. They did have big feet, clawed pads like snowshoes, broad and long. Lords of winter. Nothing up here could harm them, nothing scared them. Art said people had seen them chasing away bears, mountain lions, wolves. Masters of all they surveyed.

Captain Art regarded them with a fixation Mary found pleasing. He was lost in it. They were in no hurry; this was the place to be. Again she thought of Frank in the meadow above Flims, but now it was all right, she could be grateful he had taken her up there, that he had introduced her to this man. It was getting cold, she felt the first pinch of hunger, she had to pee. But there before her, wolverines. It was a blessing.

Only when the sun dropped into the treetops did Art stir and lead them back to the airship. By then they were really cold, and warming up in the gondola was a kind of party. They flew east on the wind, looking down at the pink alpenglow suffusing the range of light.

North and east above desert, the Rockies, flat prairie, and then tundra. The border between the great boreal forest and the tundra looked ramshackle and weird; a lot of permafrost here had melted, Art said, creating what was called a drunken forest, trees tilted this way and that. Then lakes everywhere under them, more lakes than land. Flying over this huge wet expanse it looked like the Half Earth goal would be easy to reach, or was even already accomplished. Which was not the case, but one always judged by what stood before one’s eyes. In fact they infested the planet like locusts. No, that too was wrong. In the cities it looked like that, but not here. There were many realities on a planet this big.

The new port city on the Arctic Ocean, called Mackenzie Prime, looked like an old industrial site. A single dock six kilometers long, studded with cranes for handling container ships. The opening up of the Arctic Ocean to ships had made for one of the odd zones of the Anthropocene. Traffic was mostly container ships refurbished as autopiloted solar-powered freighters, slow but steady. Carbon-neutral transport on a great circle route, and as such not much to complain about. Also there were few to complain, at least in terms of locals; the total population on the coasts of the Arctic Ocean still numbered less than a million people: Inuit, Sami, Athapaskan, Inupiat, Yakut; Russian, American, Canadian, Scandinavian.

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 saw.

“Didn’t something drive you up here?” she pressed.

“Oh,” he said, “let’s not talk about that.”

She relented, feeling she had gone too fast, hit a wall. “You like the beauty,” she said. “I know. And it is beautiful.”

“It is,” he agreed quickly. “I never get over it.”

She smiled. “You’re lucky.”

“It’s true.” And he added: “Especially tonight.”

She laughed at that.

He was still young enough to blush. She knew that kind of fair skin very well; her grandmother had blushed furiously right into her nineties.

After that conversation, the habit was set. They stayed for a nightcap in the viewing chamber after the others had retired. There they had the view of everything below. When he dimmed the room lights, the world below them became visible. This was especially true when the moon was up; then the land and ocean became eldritch things, glittery and dark, distinct in their forms.

The airship also had a tiny viewing chamber on top of its big body, there among the solar panels, so that Art and his guests could see the stars when the moon was down. In its earliest phase, after the thin glowing crescent of the moon set, he took guests up through the body of the ship to this chamber to observe the starbowl. One night at new moon he led Mary up there after the others had retired. Milky Way low in the west, Orion climbing up over the eastern horizon, all of this very far from cities, and at five thousand feet, it was simply amazing how many stars they could see. It was a whole different sky, primal and alive. Art knew the constellations, and some of the stories behind them. He had a telescope in that bubble set with a tracking motor that kept it fixed wherever he aimed it, but on that night he left it alone. He taught Mary to see a galaxy visible to the naked eye, in the north near Cassiopeia.

But mostly they stayed in what he called the understudy, looking down at the Earth. As they flew down the Atlantic, over Iceland, then the Hebrides, then Ireland—this last part for her, and for him too, perhaps—then over the Bay of Biscay—they would say good night to everyone, then she would go to her cabin, go to the bathroom, change clothes perhaps, and slip down the private stairs he had taught her to find, using the key code he had taught her to use, back to the viewing room at the bow, now locked and empty, except for them.

One night they watched the Pillars of Hercules float by below them, framing the Strait of Gibraltar. The little lumps of Gibraltar Rock and Jebel Musa stood like sentinels over the black water. Art told Mary the story of the flooding of the Mediterranean; it had been a dry low plain between Europe and Africa, then as an ice age had ended and sea level rose, the Atlantic had spilled through this strait into what had been flat playas. Two years of flow, he said, at a thousand times the rate of the Amazon, moving at forty meters a second, and carving a channel a thousand feet deep, until the Med was filled and the two bodies of water equalized in elevation.

“When did that happen?”

“About five million years ago, they say. There isn’t total agreement.”

“There never is.”

She watched him closely. A flood, a sudden breakthrough. Now he was talking about the end of the last ice age, fifteen thousand years ago, when enormous lakes of meltwater on top of the great ice sheet had broken through ice dams and poured down into the ocean in stupendous floods, changing the climate of the whole world. Then the Mediterranean had risen high enough to flood through the hills of the Bosporus, filling the Black Sea’s area in just a few years’ time, flooding land that had been occupied by humans, giving rise to the legend of Noah’s flood.

He was nattering on. He was perhaps a little nervous. Was he a dry plain himself, she wondered, a space waiting to be flooded? Was she the Atlantic, he the Mediterranean? And she? Was she rising? Would she pour over into him and fill him up?

There was no way to know, no rush to decide. They were headed for Antarctica, and they hadn’t even reached the equator yet. There was time. She could enjoy the idea of it, mull it over in mind and body. When she got up to go to her cabin, at the end of that night, she leaned over and gave him a quick kiss on the top of the head.

Across the Atlas Mountains, east over the Sahel. Here there were new salt lakes and marshes being created by water pumped up from the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. Salt seas in dry basins, an interesting experiment. They definitely changed things. Here in the Sahel, the dust storms that used to fly off these desert basins over the Atlantic were much diminished, and certain kinds of plankton out to sea were going hungry. Unexpected consequences—no, unforeseen consequences. Because now they were expected, even when they couldn’t be predicted.

For now, the desert below them was dotted by long lakes. Green, brown, sky blue, cobalt. Cat’s paws. Little towns hugged their shores, or stood on outcrops nearby. Irrigated fields formed circles on the land, circles of green and yellow like quilting art. Local culture was said to be thriving, Art said. Polls indicated most residents loved their new lakes, especially younger people. Without them we would have left, they said. The land was dying, the world had killed it. Now it would live.

A red dawn, punctuated by two black masses rising up higher than they were: Ethiopian highlands to their left, Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro to their right. As they flew through this immense gap, Art told them about Jules Verne’s first hit novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon. Also about his later works The Mysterious Island and The Clipper of the Clouds, both describing balloon and airship travels, as did of course a big part of Around the World in Eighty Days. Art also told them about Verne’s Invasion of the Sea, which told the story of pumping seawater onto Saharan deserts to create lakes, just as they had seen during the previous few days. Verne’s books had bewitched him as a youth, he said. An idea of how to live. He had taught himself French in order to read them in the original, said that Verne’s prose was far better than people usually supposed when judging by the wretched early translations.

“And so we’re here,” one of them said, “with our own Captain Nemo!”

“Yes,” Art replied easily. “But without his brooding, or so I hope.” This said with a lightning glance Mary’s way. “I hope I’m more like Passepartout. Passing by all, you know, with the least amount of difficulty.”

The green and gray masses of Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro loomed over them to the south, one very flat-topped, the other a little flat-topped. Neither had glaciers, nor any sign of snow. No such thing as the snows of Kilimanjaro. Something they could only hope for in distant times to come.

But the great plains of east Africa were still populated by animals. Yes, they were now doing a safari from the air. Elephants, giraffes, antelopes, great herds of all these, migrating from river to river. Some of the streams’ water was now piped in, Art said quietly. Desalinated at the seashore and then piped up to the headwaters and released to keep the streams flowing, the herds alive. They were in their twelfth straight year of drought.

Then Madagascar. The reforestation of that big island had been happening for well over a generation, and such was the fecundity of life that its rugged hillsides already looked densely forested, dark and wild. It had changed during Art’s time aloft, he said, and now the people of Madagascar were joining with Cubans and other island nations to help similar restoration efforts all over the world. Indonesia, Brazil, and west Africa were teammates in this effort. Rewilding, Art called it. They were rewilding down there.

That night when Mary joined Art in his understudy, Madagascar was already behind them, but the air still seemed to carry its spicy scent. Art sat looking back at the island, bulking like a sea creature with thick napped fur. He seemed content. They sipped their whiskies for a while, enjoying a companionable silence. Then they talked about other voyages they had made. He asked about her escape on foot over the Alps, apparently a famous story of her professional life, and she made it brief, talked about the Oeschinensee, and Thomas and Sibilla, and the Fründenjoch. Have you flown your Clipper over the Alps? she asked.

Once or twice, he said. It’s a bit much. They’re too high. And the weather is just so variable.

I love the Alps, she said. They’ve caught my affection.

He regarded her with a little smile. A shy Irishman. She knew that type and liked it. She had always liked those men who kept to themselves, who had only a sidelong look for her. Probably there was something back there in his past, some event or situation that had made him so aloof; but the island world he had made for himself was one that she was coming to like. Or she could see why he liked it. He was younger than she was, but old enough that they were in that temporal space that felt roughly contemporaneous.

These were fleeting thoughts. Mostly she just watched the ocean and the great black island behind them, slowly receding. But they were thoughts that led in a certain direction. She tried to track them as if they were shy animals. Desire stirring in her, maybe that was like a tracker’s curiosity. On the hunt. A hope for contact. Then in the midst of her musing he stood, saying he was feeling tired. Time for bed. He led the way up to the main gallery, said good night and turned toward his cabin.

Not a mind reader, she thought. Recalling that in her youth she had seemed to be able to reach out telepathically. Or maybe it had been a matter of looks, of pheromones. Animals in heat. Not at their age. But there was no rush.

Nothing more than that happened between them for the rest of that voyage. They still met on some nights in the viewing chamber to chat, but no more Madagascars; they were too far south.

Over the endless ocean, angling west to fight the great shove of the westerlies. Their pushback caused the Clipper to tremble and rock more than earlier in their voyage. Then one morning she woke and went to the viewing chamber, and there to the south lay Antarctica. Everyone was standing at the forward window to see it. The ocean was distinctly darker than before, almost black, which itself was strange, and faintly ominous; then to the south a white land like a low wall, white flecked with a black blacker than the strangely black sea. This great escarpment of ice and rock extended from east to west for as far as they could see.

Antarctica. It was early autumn, the sea ice minimal, although as they flew south they saw that there were icebergs everywhere. These made no pattern, just white chunks on black water. An occasional misshapen iceberg of jade or turquoise hue. Flocks, or it seemed rather shoals, of tiny penguins dotted some of these icebergs. Once they flew over a pod of orcas, sleek-backed and ominous. On tabular bergs they sometimes saw Weddell seals, looking like slugs splayed on the ice, often with smaller slugs attached to their sides like leeches. Mother and child. Their cousins, down here thriving on ice. If they were thriving.

Then Antarctica itself, white and foreboding. Ice Planet.

It was surreal in that icy desolation to come on six giant aircraft carriers, arranged in a rough hexagon like a coven of city-states, surrounded by smaller craft—icebreakers, tugboats, shore craft—it was hard to tell what the smaller craft might be, they were so small.

Apparently aircraft carriers made excellent polar stations, being nuclear powered, and outweighing ordinary icebreakers by a thousand times or more. Sea ice stood no chance against such behemoths, they were icebreakers from God and could leave anytime they wanted to; but they didn’t. They made a little floating city, anchored by the shore of Antarctica, supporting various inland encampments, all of which had been airlifted upcountry from here.

They passed over the carrier city and landed on the snowy surface of the continent itself. Out of the Clipper onto flat snow. Very bright and very cold, although no colder than Zurich on a windy winter’s day.

Around them cloth-walled huts, blue-glassed boxes. The camp managers were happy to meet Mary, seemed to consider her their patroness, which made her laugh. And they were well-acquainted with Captain Art, a frequent visitor.

The glacier slowdown operation had been a success. Ice fields had therefore also slowed. All this would have been impossible without the navies helping. Aircraft carriers were mobile towns. Deploying them like this was a chance to make use of the huge amounts of money that had been spent building them. Swords into plowshares kind of thing.

“Like the Swiss,” Mary observed. “Can we see a pumping site?”

Of course. Already scheduled. For sure a feature of interest.

All of Art’s passengers occupied only a corner of one of their giant helicopters. Helmets on, sit sideways looking out through a small window, then up, straight up, not like the Clipper’s rise. Then over endless white snow, listening to the pilot and her crew discuss things in a language she didn’t recognize. Black sea behind them receding from view.

“Why is the ocean black down here?” she asked into her helmet’s microphone.

“No one knows.”

“I heard one guy say it’s because the water is so clean down here, and the bottom so deep starting from right offshore, that you’re seeing down to the dark part of the ocean where the sunlight doesn’t penetrate. So you’re seeing through super-clear water to the black of the deeps.”

“Can that be right?”

“I heard the plankton down here are black, and they color the water.”

“Lots of days it looks as blue as anywhere, I think.”

“No way!”

Then they were descending. Snow or ice as far as they could see. Then a cluster of black dots. Around the dots black threads, like a broken spider web. These dots and lines held civilization suspended over the abyss.

“How many stations are there like this one?” she asked.

“Five or six hundred.”

“And how many people does that add up to?”

“The stations are mostly automated. Maintenance and repair crews fly in as needed. There are caretakers in some of them. But mainly it’s construction crews, moving around at need. I don’t know, twenty thousand people? It fluctuates. There were more a few years ago.”

The helo landed with a foursquare thump. They unbelted, stood awkwardly, filed down the narrow gap between seats and wall and down metal steps to the ice.

Cold. Bright. Windy. Cold.

Light blasted around the edges of her sunglasses and blinded her. Tears were blown off her eyes onto her sunglasses, where they froze in smears. She tried to see through all that. Blinking hard, she followed the others toward this settlement’s main hut, like a blue-walled motor home on stilts.

“Wait, I don’t want to go inside yet,” she protested. “I want to see.”

A couple of their hosts stayed out with her and walked her to a pump, which stood inside a little heated hut of its own. Not very heated, as the floor inside was ice, with the black housing of the pump plunging right into it. The saving of civilization, right there before her. A piece of plumbing.

They went back outside and followed one of the pipelines up a gentle gradient. It stretched across the land from black box to black box, lying right on the ice. Mary stopped to look around. The snow seemed to her like a lake surface that had flash-frozen, all its little waves caught mid-break. Glowing in the light. Her guides explained things to her. She liked their enthusiasm. They were happy to be here not because they were saving the world, but because they were in Antarctica. If you like it, one told her when she asked, you like it a lot. It gets into you, until nowhere else seems as good.

A white plane under a blue dome. Some cirrus clouds over them looked close enough to touch.

“It’s like another planet,” Mary said.

Yes, they said. But actually just Earth.

“Thank you,” she said to them. “Now I’m ready to go back. I’m glad to have seen this, it’s just amazing. Thank you for showing it to me. But now let’s go back.”

Because I too have a place I love.

They flew north up the Atlantic, to see St. Helena and Ascension. Before Art dropped Mary off in Lisbon, where she would train home, she joined him in his understudy one last time. When they were sitting in their usual spots, sipping their drams, she said, “Will we meet again?”

He looked uncertain. “I hope so!”

She regarded him. A shy man. Some animals are reclusive.

“Why do you do this?” she said.

“I like it.”

“What do you do when you’re on the ground?”

“I resupply.”

“Aren’t there any places you like to walk around?”

He considered this. “I like Venice. And London. New York. Hong Kong, if it isn’t too hot.”

She stared at him for a while. He shifted his gaze down, clearly uncomfortable. Finally he said, “Mostly I just like being here. I like the sky people. The sky villages are a lot of fun to visit. I like the way they look. And the people in them. Everyone’s on a voyage. Did you ever read The Twenty-one Balloons? It’s an old children’s book about a sky village.”

“Like your Jules Verne.”

“Yes, but for kids.”

Verne is for kids, Mary didn’t say.

“Anyway I read it when I was about five. Actually my mom read it to me.”

“Is your mom still alive?”

“No. She died five years ago.”

“Sorry to hear.”

“Is your mom still alive?”

“No. My parents both died young.”

They sat there for a while. Mary saw that he was unsettled. Rejecting all the fashionable diagnostics of their time, knowing him to be fond of her, maybe, she pondered it. So, he was quiet. Perhaps he was shy. Perhaps he played a part for people: Captain Art, doing his best to get by.

She was not quiet, nor was she shy. A bossy forward girl, one teacher had said of her at school; and that was true. So she could only guess at him. But this was always the case, with everyone. And it seemed to her they got along. His silence was restful. As if he were content. She wasn’t content, and she wasn’t sure she had ever met anyone who was, so it was a hard thing for her to recognize. Maybe she was wrong. No one was content. She was projecting onto his silence. But from what, and onto what? Oh it was all such a muddle, such a swamp of guesswork and feeling.

“I like you,” she said. “And you like me.”

“I do,” he said firmly, and then waved a hand, as if to push that aside. “I don’t mean to be intrusive.”

“Please,” Mary said. “I’m about to disembark here.”

“True.”

“And so?”

“And so what?”

Mary sighed. She was going to have to do the work here. “So—maybe we can meet again.”

“I’d like that.”

After a pause during which Mary watched him, making him go on, if he would, he said, “You could come with me again. Be my celebrity guide. We could make a tour of all the greatest landscape restoration sites, or geoengineering projects.”

“God spare me.”

He laughed. “Or whatever you like. Your favorite cities. You could be a guest curator or whatnot.”

“I’d rather just be your girlfriend.”

His eyebrows rose at that. As if it were an entirely new idea.

She sighed. “I’ll think about it. One nature cruise may be enough for me. But some ideas might come to me.”

He took a deep breath, held it, let it out in a long sigh. Now he looked really content. He glanced at her, met her eye, did not look away. Smiled.

“I always come back to Zurich. I have my room there.”

She nodded, thinking it over. Say it took years to get to know this man; what else did she have to do? “I’ll want you to talk a bit more than you have,” she warned him. “I’ll want to know things about you.”

“I’ll try,” he said. “I might have some things to say.”

She laughed at that, knocked back the whisky in her shot glass. It was late.

“Good,” she said. She stood and kissed him on the top of the head, ignoring his flinch away. “Maybe you can tell me when you’re in town, and we can get together. Fasnacht is at the end of the winter, that’s a party I like. We could do the town on Fasnacht.”

He frowned. “I’ll be out on another trip that month. I’m not sure I’ll be back by then.”

Mary stopped herself from sighing, from saying anything sharp. This was not going to be anything quick, or even normal. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. “Now I’m off to bed.”