Glass Sky (22 page)

ILUK STOOD NEXT to his son, on a low hill overlooking the lake, his ski jacket bright in the midnight sun. Wispy clouds decorated the crisp arctic sky, white against pale blue. He stared off to the horizon, where the tundra fell into a distant gray sea. A flood of memories: camping by the lakeshore; roasting the day’s catch over a fire made of whatever bits of wood they’d scavenged from the sparse bushes; the mosquitoes.

“My father used to take me here before you were born, Mike,” said Iluk. “We saw a polar bear once, right over there. A mother with a cub.” Today, he didn’t even carry a gun. The closest bear would be at the Innatuk zoo.

“Did you ever go out with Grandpa, to hunt on the ice?” asked Mike.

Iluk sighed. “No.” Did anyone still hold onto the old traditions, in some remote, more northern community? He should have gone along, at least once, so that he could tell the story. But he’d been young then, and the mining boom was starting. Good jobs. High wages. It had always seemed as if there would be one more chance. Until the year the ice had broken in March. The year his father hadn’t come home.

“You all right, Dad?”

“This place – it brings back memories.” Iluk turned to face the sun, letting the warmth on his face burn off his darkening mood. Fragrant flowers scented the tundra, a carpet of color soaking up the 24-hour light. Birds wheeled overhead, squawking with joy in their summer breeding grounds.

Iluk shouldered his pack. “Let’s get down to the lake. I bet it’s still full of fish.”

They tromped through the grass, but as they got closer, Iluk felt an uncomfortable shiver, as if somebody were scratching fingers on a chalkboard just outside his hearing. He slowed. Held up his hand. “Just be quiet for a second – hear that?”

Mike shot him a worried look. “Is this some sneaky way to teach me our traditions, dad? Because I’m not sure tracking will be useful in second-year robotics.”

“I don’t see any birds on the lake,” said Iluk. “Don’t you think that’s funny?”

They moved closer. “The lake is bubbling,” said Mike.

Iluk could see it too. The lake’s whole surface roiled, animated by trapped gas rising from the depths. Bubbles popped out with a deep blup, blup, blup.

“Methane,” said Iluk. “The permafrost’s melting again. Runaway warming. Like the year before the sulfuring started. We need to report this.”

Mike stepped back. “I learned about this in school.” He sniffed. “Is it poisonous?”

“I don’t think so. But it is explosive.” Iluk chuckled. “When I was younger, we used to go out in winter to light methane bubbles on fire. Inuit fireworks, we called it. I burned my eyebrows off more than once.”

Mike grinned. “Could we try it? It doesn’t look like we’ll be doing much fishing.”

Iluk studied the lake. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. This lake’s bubbling like your mother’s soup.”

“I don’t smell anything,” said Mike. “There can’t be that much methane in the air. We could light a stick and throw it in from a distance.”

Oh, to be 18 again. Who doesn’t like explosions? And he’d struggled to convince Mike to come out, even for this short camping trip.

“OK,” said Iluk, without much conviction. “But we have to stand way back.”

They moved a full 20 meters from the edge. We can always come closer after the first one. Iluk dropped his pack and dug the cooking kit out of the top compartment. Mike twisted a dead branch off one of the gnarled bushes that clung to the hillside and dipped it into the fuel bottle, making a torch. He screwed the lid back on. First rule of fuel bottles: don’t light anything while the bottle is open.

“Ready?” Mike held up the lighter.

The breeze shifted, carrying the lake air towards them.

Why am I panting so much?

“Wait!”

But Mike had already lit the branch.

TANIA AND GORDON followed the crowd down a long corridor into a ratty immigration hall decorated with faded murals of snowcapped mountains. Calgary. Even from the air, Tania had felt the sense of decay: boarded-up houses, streets cracked and full of weeds. In the gleaming downtown, entire office buildings stood abandoned, monuments to what had once been the hub of Canada’s energy industry. When breakthroughs in solar power and battery storage had changed the energy landscape, strip mining tarsoaked sand from beneath boreal forests had lost its cachet.

The line crept forward. A bored customs agent glanced up at Tania. “Tap here.”

Tania tapped her omni to the security scanner.

“What brings you to Canada?”

“Business,” said Tania. “I’m with UNBio. My colleague and I are going to Innatuk.”

The agent perked up. “The exploding lake?”

Tania nodded. “The Canadian government doesn’t have methane monitoring stations. I’m here to install some instruments and see how widespread the releases are.”

“The last few years have been great for northern shipping,” said the agent. “I knew it was too good to last. I just hope you’re not going to do anything too drastic.”

Northern shipping? How silly of me. And here I was worried that we’d need another round of sulfuring and end up killing millions.

***

The flight north to Innatuk started over parched prairies, but those soon gave way to millions of acres of beetle-killed pines, crisscrossed with roads and seismic lines. The dead trees protruded like slender gray tombstones amidst the new greens of poplar and spruce. Tania sat next to the window, responding to CO2-exemption requests using the plane’s wireless network. With the head start she had on Pax Gaia she’d been able to send out preliminary CO2 targets only days after the Climate Summit. And already special interests were emerging like maggots from a rotting carcass: surely a ban on fossil fuels doesn’t include highgrade Russian coal? Surely Indian cows don’t need methane reduction genes?

At least they’re talking to me. Soon they’ll realize I don’t have any real power and they’ll ignore me completely.

Gordon, his VR headset on, was checking his permafrost simulation code. “I don’t get it,” he kept repeating. “The models show ground frost right through the summer. How could they be so wrong?”

The biomes changed as they flew north, patches of green at first, then intact pine forests, then tundra so dotted with lakes that it was hard to say whether land or water was dominant. Signs of civilization vanished. The far north was an empty place, even on this crowded planet. In the bright sunlight it looked warm and inviting, more golf course than doomsday machine. Yet frozen in the soil was enough methane to raise global temperatures by ten degrees.

Tania tried to read a journal paper on the topic, but arctic soil chemistry was far from her specialty. She brought up the insect photo Cheng had sent her. A dorsal view. Not helpful. She dictated a quick email on how to count prolegs, then shut down her omni and stared out of the window.

“Is there even a road to Innatuk?” she asked.

Gordon shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“We had a winter ice road twenty years ago,” said a ponytailed man from across the aisle. “But now it doesn’t stay cold for long enough, even with the sulfuring. And the tundra’s too swampy for a year-round road. The frost cracks asphalt to shit. And polymer roads are too expensive.”

“Are you from Innatuk?” Tania asked. His dark skin and black hair marked him as a native.

“All us redskins look the same, eh, white woman?”

“Sorry… I…”

The man laughed. “Just giving you a hard time. I’m from British Columbia. Coastal Haida. But the jobs are in Innatuk.”

“The mines?” Tania asked.

“In the summer, yes. Lead-zinc. Three months on a rocky island, living in a trailer.”

“And in the winter?”

“I work on an icebreaker,” he said. “We’re keeping the Northwest Passages open year round now. Gotta take advantage of all this melting, eh? Good for the economy! And you? What brings you pole side.”

Tania and Gordon exchanged a glance. “We’re with UNBio,” said Tania. “I’m hoping to stop the melting. I guess that makes us the other team.”

The man shook his head thoughtfully. “My ancestors hunted game in those dead forests we flew over. They drank out of rivers that don’t reach the sea anymore.” He scowled, his jaw clenched. “My people know the price of progress.”

***

After a night of sunshine and a gruesome breakfast of half-thawed muffins, Tania and Gordon wrestled five duffle bags of gear to the street. A rusty Canadian Climate Institute van waited in front of the hotel. A tall, thin man stepped out to greet them. Like most of the locals, he wore a toque.

“Jason Grady,” he said, hoisting one of the duffels into the cargo area. “I run the institute. Glad you could come.”

Tania bit back a dozen undiplomatic replies about the state of Canadian methane monitoring. “Thanks for inviting us.”

The van drove them down to the harbor, following a broad, park-like street. The downtown, a cluster of modern low-rises built on a rocky outcropping to provide solid footing for the buildings, dwindled behind them.

“How can you be a climatologist when your government puts so many restrictions on your work?” asked Gordon.

“In my government’s defense, we did compromise on CO2 last week,” said Grady. “Prime Minister Thompson’s catching a lot of heat for that domestically.”

“Yet he still wants to hold temperature increases to current levels,” pressed Gordon. “Surely he doesn’t believe that’s sustainable. Look at the sea level rise in Amsterdam. Look at your own glaciers and forests.”

“You’re preaching to the choir,” said Grady. “But, look at what we’re up against.” Four enormous icebreakers floated in the harbor, sporting prominent Canadian flags on their orange hulls. Short-haul cargo ships, piled high with ore, lined up in the bay. Automated cranes moved back and forth, loading the ore into railcars, feeding the refineries ringing the city.

They turned into an industrial area near the docks, stopping outside a rusty hangar. A decrepit helicopter with Canadian Climate Institute decals waited on the tarmac. Technicians in light green coveralls unloaded the equipment from the van and set to work mounting the new instruments onto the helicopter’s fuselage.

“What’s your gut?” Grady asked Gordon. “Is it runaway methane?”

Gordon shrugged. “My models say no. Hopefully today’s measurements will help me figure – hey!” He waved at the technicians. “Careful with the gas spectrometer!”

Once the instruments had been mounted, they climbed into the helicopter. It shuddered to life in a whine of gears, so loud that Tania could feel it through her skin despite the noise-cancelling headset. They roared north, over the harbor and onto a choppy sea separating the mainland from the string of islands that made up much of northern Canada. Dozens of cargo ships, stacked high with rectangular shipping containers, moved between occasional blocks of ice.

Gordon’s attention vanished into his instruments. “So far, I’m reading normal methane levels. It confirms the satellite measurements.”

Too soon to celebrate.

They passed over a small island, a featureless expanse of windblasted rock and scrub, dotted with lakes. The far end had been gouged out, the gaping wound of an open-pit mine bleeding fluorescent orange industrial poisons into the sea. Grady looked away in embarrassment.

Gordon pulled off his goggles. “I’ve got my baseline measurements. Let’s see the lake where the fishermen died.”

Grady spoke a few words to the pilot, and the helicopter swung in a wide arc. Soon they were back over the mainland, skimming a few hundred meters above the surface. The pilot’s head darted, scanning all directions, the helicopter too old for an autopilot. Gordon made them slow down each time they passed a large lake. And each time he shook his head. “Nothing.” “Nothing.” “Still nothing.”

“The next lake is the site of the explosion,” announced Grady.

“Yep, just got it,” said Gordon. “Ten parts per million. Thirty. Sixty.” Gordon leaned over to the window, checking out the lake for himself. “Wow. You weren’t kidding. There’s a lot of methane escaping from that water. Can we land?”

“If we stay upwind,” said Grady.

The pilot set them on a rise several hundred meters away from the lake. The crisp air smelled of vague perfume from the flowers that blanketed the ground. Flocks of birds squawked. In a few months this vibrant land would be locked in darkness again, blasted by wind and snow. Tania felt a pang of nostalgia for the small town in Alaska where she’d grown up, a fishing village, backed by forest. It had been as different from this place as the deserts of Africa, but the air tasted the same, and the sun made the same low trek over the horizon.

Grady led Tania to the lake’s edge, Gordon following behind, instruments held high. The bushes near the water were charred and black from the explosion. The water’s surface bubbled like a kettle on a stove. Blurp. Bluppurpity. Blurp. Earth’s voice, mumbling in a fevered delirium. It sent a chill through Tania that the warm sunlight couldn’t quite touch.

If this is widespread then we can’t wait for the shield. We’ll have to sulfur early. Get back control. Even if it means millions of deaths.

Gordon’s face had gone pale. “I assume you have temperature probes in the lake?”

“The water’s four degrees Celsius,” said Grady.

“And that direction is north, right?” Gordon pointed at a dark gray hill baking in the sunshine at the far end of the lake.

Grady nodded. “Yes. Why?”

Gordon smiled and let out a huge sigh. “I think we’re OK,” he said. “That hill is catching the sun directly. The shale is dark, so it’s heating the meltwater, which is running into the lake like a warm tap.”

“So this methane release is localized,” said Grady.

“For now,” said Gordon. “Call it an early warning. There’s a lot of summer left. You need to get monitors in place through the whole region, in case the situation deteriorates.”

Grady nodded. “I’ll talk to the Prime Minister in person if I have to, but I’ll get it done.”

The lake burped in agreement, stirring a school of bloated, belly-up fish. Tania closed her eyes and let her shoulders relax. The whole north, from Anchorage to Archangel, will be like this soon. But not yet. Not quite yet.

“Hurry up, Jie,” she muttered under her breath. “We dodged one today, but I’m running out of options down here.”