Welcome to the Greenhouse

We live at a time when everyone knows—or should know—the future. A crucial, but often misunderstood fact about global warming is that the climate system runs on a time delay. Thus, from the concentration of greenhouse gases in the air today, it is possible to predict, with a fair degree of certainty, what average global temperatures will be like thirty or forty years from now. Ditto for sea levels and ice cover. Climate scientists refer to this as our “commitment to warming.” We’re committed to warming long before we actually experience it.

How to represent this future that we are already committed to? Climate modelers tend to rely on charts and graphs to get the message across. The contributors to this volume offer something else—stories. The characters in these stories are made up and the situations invented. The events haven’t happened and, in a strict sense, never will. But the science behind these tales is all too real. (The true “science fiction” of our time, peddled on talk radio and in the halls of Congress, is that global warming is a myth.)

At the same time, there is a lot about global warming that we don’t know. As the planet heats up, almost certainly some regions will experience more intense droughts, but which regions, exactly, and how intense will those droughts be? Monsoon patterns will shift, and produce flooding, but which cities will be submerged? Will new heat-resistant crops be developed, and new technologies invented to transport, like floating highways? The greatest unknown of all is, of course, how people, collectively, will respond. Will they be chastened? Genocidal? Or will they just muddle along, behind growing seawalls and shrinking coasts? Science—even social science—can’t answer questions like this, which is why we turn to science fiction. Welcome to the Greenhouse!

—Elizabeth Kolbert

“This month, negotiators will meet in Cancún for another round of international climate talks, and it’s a safe bet that, apart from the usual expressions of despair, nothing will come of them. It may seem that we’ll just keep going around and around on climate change forever. Unfortunately, that’s not the case: one day, perhaps not very long from now, the situation will spin out of our control.”

—Elizabeth Kolbert,
The New Yorker,
22 November 2010

I am, I readily admit, something of a contrarian. It’s probably the result of having had a scientist for a father. Whatever the reason, if you present to me a truth that is universally acknowledged, I’ll question it instinctively.

I’ve largely sat on the sidelines during the global warming controversies that have raged over the past decade. Do I think Earth’s climate is warming? Yes. Do I know what the causes are? Can’t say for certain that I do. In fact, I don’t think anyone can say for certain that they know.

I suspect my position is a fairly common one.

However, as Elizabeth Kolbert points out, that sort of complacent attitude is likely to lead to chaos. Consequently, I asked a number of writers who speculate on the future to consider the subject of climate change. What might life be like in five, fifty, or five hundred years?

The results make for rewarding reading. In assembling the book, I tried to get a wide variety of responses to the issue of climate change, from the comic to the grave (one contributor told me, “I can’t find anything optimistic about global warming”), from the hopeful to the despondent, from the realistic to the wildly imaginative. A couple of stories seek answers to the climate change issues that we face, but more of the stories ask questions.

Overall, I wanted stories that make the reader consider what sorts of futures might await us. They might not all be futures we like, but I think they’re all worth considering.

—Gordon Van Gelder
Jersey City, December 2010

Yes, that’s how I knew the place. Whether it or I still exist, it has to be Benkoelen. There it is or was, an isolated stone peg in the middle of the ocean, a round rocky desolation, no beaches, fifty miles from the southwest coast of Sumatra. No place like it anywhere on the planet.

You never heard of Benkoelen? My life has always been linked to it. My father, rather late in life, married a Sumatran-Chinese lady by the name of Trilm Ma. Between them, they devised a helicopter pad here which for some years served as a single physical communication link between the island and the mainland port of Padang. Padang was ruined by recent tsunamis. But my first sight of Benkoelen was in a photograph taken by Stan, my father. The view showed a bleak and steep stairway ascending from a no less bleak quayside. Why this drab depiction could have captured my imagination I cannot say, but so it was.

Benkoelen was deserted in those days, before the heat really struck. Its earliest inhabitants had built monumentally, setting up large windowless buildings. Then it seems they left. Who they were we’ll never know. The island was empty again—apart from sparse wildlife.

Oh, I have to tell it. This was before the thronging people of the world could grasp the inescapable fact of global warming. Bainya Hosta de l’Affiche Salle, she, blue of eyelid, red of lip, gold of skin, petulant, prideful, passionate, bought Benkoelen from the Indonesian Republic …. But why go over all that again?

As the oceans of the world began to heave their mighty shoulders, so it seemed that a generation of hermits came to inhabit places that had hitherto been regarded as uninhabitable. Many another island sank forever beneath the waves, many a coastline was consumed. Benkoelen remained, seeming to stand proud above the storms like a bundle of fossilized corks.

I was sitting halfway up the west cliff, too out of breath to go further for a while. I had lost all my kit. Since the tsunami, the regular tourist run from Padang had ceased. I hired a flimsy motorized boat from Solingal on the mainland. It had capsized as we approached the bulk of Benkoelen. The waves were steady, relentless; we had been saved by the so-called fish-people, coming out to us in canoes. My briefcase and all my tackle were at the bottom of the ocean by now. But still I lived and breathed. Although I looked like a drowned rat.

This geological monument stood like a sentry box perched on the edge of the Mentawoi Trench. Seabirds screamed with excitement over it. Their cries had puzzled me as a child. My father, teasing, laughing, had said they were the souls of babies waiting to be born. Later, he told me the truth. They were only the cries of birds. He had no wish to mislead me.

In his young days, he had been a priest. But he found he could not improve the ways of people. Being on Benkoelen was a form of self-exile. There were no humans on Benkoelen. Nothing of the greed or the comfort of the West.

At last I got myself on my way, driven by the gloomy news I had to deliver to my sister. I had only myself to blame, had come all the way from Cairo just to speak to Cass.

That bent, barbarous Bainya—how did she get into the picture? I had been drinking in a Medan hotel bar. Bainya’s photo was there, curled around the edges. She was looking for contributions to help establish support for her new Chimp Center. Steep Street, Benkoelen. She looked good, vile, delicious. We became lovers. I lived with her in her palace in Cairo. Although the affair could not last, I still had a stake in the island.

Oh well, so the world was… nothing if not complex …. Greed, money, ambition—we had made it too complex to live in in peace…

The morning over Benkoelen was rough. Great blasts of rain, thunder, lightning. Nothing unusual. The Sumatrans were spooked by such weather; no aircraft were aloft. Soon enough, there that isolated chimney of rock was, Benkoelen, braving the wine-dark Indian Ocean, scene of my childhood and my love life—and my sister’s project. Now, without any instruments, I looked for Steep Street, as if there were a street on the island that was not steep.

Rain came thrashing down. I went marching upward, against the stream. Crude edifices on either side gave no sign of life. But wait!—a light showed in a grim window, offering shelter. I pounded on the door. A long wait before it opened.

“It’s raining. Come on in.”

Although there was no welcome in the voice, the words were welcome enough. A bowed figure stood back to let me pass. We moved into a small room furnished by a table and two wooden chairs. A lantern standing on the table illuminated a muddle of papers there.

“I shall find you a towel. I have precious items here I do not want ruined.”

My host was pale and whiskery, a slip of a man, drifting like a leaf toward old age.

“You’re soaked. I’ll get you something to drink, too,” he said.

He left the room, that seedy little room, without an ounce of comfort in it and a window looking out on barren rock. A wicker cage stood on a shelf, a silent and motionless bird within it.

My reluctant host returned with a bottle and two glasses, all the while keeping an eye on me.

He placed the bottle carefully on the table.

“It’s Metaxa. The Greeks are selling it off cheap.”

As he half-filled the two glasses, he continued to talk, “It’s yet another proof of my theory. The human race developed from the apes, with spurts of quality here and there but never enough. Never sufficient real wisdom. Just herd things. The family… Take most kinds of sport—soccer, boxing, cricket, baseball, and the rest, all encouraging violence, applauding it—they are children’s games. True, intellectuals do crop up, but the ordinary people hate intellectuals.”

I was working on the Metaxa.

“And intellectuals have no wish to govern, knowing that the crowd they have to govern are incorrigible. And now this ecological disaster. We saw it coming. We were warned. Scientists warned us. We didn’t do anything until it was too late. I doubt we’ll live through it.”

Both of us drank in silence.

“Patrick White!” the older man burst out suddenly. “A great writer, wouldn’t you say? Deep understanding of human folly.” “

I don’t know the name.”

“You don’t know the name of Patrick White?” He was astonished or feigned astonishment. “Patrick was a friend, stayed here one time.” He stared at me, summing me up. “Well, there you are! Patrick is dead now, of course. Great writer—already forgotten… Some men never read. Not properly.”

“As a kid, I read a lot,” I told him. “I liked the mysteries of Erle Stanley Gardner. As a man—well, I got better things to do.”

“Mysteries…”

To break a rather strained silence, I said I must be on my way. I was going to the Chimp Center.

My host appeared suddenly alert.

“You look to be in a bad way, if you don’t mind my saying so. You can stay here for the night. I can cook some fish. I’ve got some fish. There’s only one bedroom, but you can sleep in with me.”

Avoiding his gaze, I said I had to be on my way. I said I had an appointment—in fact, with my sister. He shrugged.

“You must please yourself.” Spoken in tones of disgust.

He said he had a map. It was difficult to get to the Chimp Center without one. He looked vexed as he thumbed the cork back into the Metaxa bottle.

There I stood, impatient to be away, running a fingernail down one of the seams of the table. A woodlouse came running from its place of refuge. It was small, sand-colored. I looked more closely. Several of the little insects now emerged, as if in answer to a general alarm.

I had never thought much of the creatures. Now with sudden compassion I realized they would all be swept away when Benkoelen yielded to the onslaught of the high seas.

The Patrick White scholar and I bade each other goodbye.

A hot muggy wind was blowing, dying, blowing again. Although I could not see the ocean from the refuge in a valley, I could hear a kind of cannonade of waves against the tower, and each blow against the tower I felt through the soles of my boots.

Climbing over fallen rock—rock patched by dark mosses—was necessary until I reached a track where the going was easier. There I came across a length of sturdy driftwood to assist me. My climb across piles of boulders became easier.

I gained a wide and open platform, on the far side of which was a glimpse of the green tops of trees. A rare sight on Benkoelen. It was, I thought, my first sight of the Chimp Center. My anxieties awoke again.

In part, memory came back to taunt me. I had a photo back in Cairo of my father standing on this very spot, smiling his lazy friendly smile. The dear old boy had led a more fruitful life than I; if only I could be granted another ten years…

Meanwhile, a distraction to one side, where a small cliff was covered by a curtain of what I took to be a kind of ivy—until part of it flew off. Intrigued, I moved closer. The cliff was covered with a kind of bird with wings more resembling a split shell than an ordinary wing of feathers.

The birds were packed so tightly they resembled a curtain. Claws were their thing, being long and thin but powerful. The claws, not the wings; the changing climate had rendered the mainland too distant, too difficult, to reach. One or two birds took flight, flying about me to scare me off.

The claws threatening my head had recently speared a wriggling thing resembling a shelled uncooked shrimp. So that was what the birds were at—bug-hunting, probing the stones, eating the maggots hidden there.

Of course I recognized the bird. It was a so-called Benkoelen bullfinch, such as I had seen caged in the hermit’s house.

This one was coming too close. I managed to knock it away. The creature gave a shrill squawk of surprise.

As luck would have it, the turn I made to strike the bird gave me sight of a man, some meters distant, approaching me with every sign of stealth and a cudgel in his left hand. I stood up straight to him, holding my stick ready, but without exhibiting any particular signs of threat.

The stalker stopped stalking. Without lowering his weapon, he stared and shouted something at me.

“I don’t understand. Who are you?” I asked. I could see he was one of the type of fisher-folk who had saved me from the ocean.

His answer was incomprehensible.

He made a rush at me, swinging his stick at my skull. Dropping on one knee, I gave a mighty swipe to his shins as he charged past. He fell.

Before he could rise, some bullfinches forsook the wall and flew at my opponent. Their long cruel beaks sought for his eyes. They were old enemies. He hauled himself to his feet. I caught a whiff of fish as he departed. The bullfinches went squawking back to their wall, taking no notice of me.

I headed for where the tops of the green trees showed, while I could not help but meditate on the episode just past. No doubt the Benkoelen bullfinches had suffered the depredations of the fisher-folk and fought to defend themselves; but why two strangers should attack each other was another matter. Overpopulation must take some blame. And if two strangers then why not two nations? And two nations or an alliance against another alliance, why, then, all things necessary for climate change were in preparation: machinery, armament, tanks, missiles, nuclear weapons, huge expenditures of oil and coal… I was sickened by my own reasoning.

Yet I still clutched my club… It seemed only reasonable.

Where the flat stretch ended was a cliff. I stood there looking down at the crowns of a number of trees: in fact, a small forest. Of course an imported forest. There were creatures in the trees, swinging from bough to bough. I remembered that the orangutan was the only ape which remained arboreal throughout life. How wise they were not to come down… And they were safe here: practically extinct on the mainland.

Well, “safe”? I feared that the knowledge I had to deliver meant that they were doomed.

The strange geology of Benkoelen allowed me to find something resembling a stairway down into the forest; soon I was walking among the entangled trunks, where often the branches of one tree embraced the branches of the next.

As I pressed on through the entanglement, the odd nut landed on my head, accompanied by scuttlings from above and sounds resembling human laughter. I came unharmed to a clearing. A notice stood there: ORANGUTAN CONSERVATION CENTRE PROP. CASS PHILLIMORE.

“Salaam Aleikum,” came a lazy voice. A young man was sitting by the doorway of a house built in a clearing, to which were attached cages of wire netting.

I returned the youngster’s greeting. He sat there unmoving, looking to my mind half in a dream. Passing him, I went into the house, calling Cass’ name. She emerged from a kind of office, mopping her eyes.

“Oh, hello, Coyne. Dum Dum has died.” She retreated into the room from which she had emerged, and I followed. On the table by the window was a cushion and on the cushion lay the body of a small orang-utan. Cass began to snivel again. “She was just playing and she fell out of a tree. My vet quit last week. I’ve done what I could. Dum Dum was my special darling, poor little pet.”

She began to weep compulsively. I put my arm about her shoulders, but she shook it away, rejecting any attempts to comfort her.

I might have been a stranger. Indeed, I was.

“You’ll have to bury her now, Cass. In this heat, she’ll soon begin to stink.”

She showed her reddened face to me. “Oh, go away! Do you think I don’t know that?”

“A typical welcome. I’ll be in the next room while you calm down a bit. I’m afraid I have some rather dire news for you.”

“Oh god, I don’t wish to hear about the outside world. It’s so full of misery.”

“That’s not so.” But said wearily, knowing what had to come.

I found a Michelob in the fridge, and sat in a rattan chair to consider that it might not prove so easy to break my news to my sister, as I had imagined; but I had volunteered just for the sake of seeing Benkoelen for what I believed would be the last time.

Switching on an old-fashioned TV, I listened to an announcer, possibly speaking from Jakarta, announcing that China had invaded South Korea. Indonesia had bombed Australia, in return for Australia’s strike against the blowing up of terrorists from Surabaja. Cass came into the room and switched the screen off.