Welcome to the Greenhouse (10 page)

Ahead of her, Bruckner shouted, “Out of the way!”

The man stepped forward, raised a shotgun. She saw something compressed and dark in his face.

“You shot down the planes?” he demanded.

A tall Inuk, racing in from the side, shouted, “I saw their car, coming from there!”

Bruckner slammed to a stop, reached down for his.45 automatic—and the man shot Bruckner, pumped his shotgun. Gene yelled, and without pause, the man shot him, too. The two seemed to jump backward, then sprawled, lifeless. All in the time it took her to blink.

Elinor stood rigid, staring. She felt the world collapsing around her. She shook her head, stepped quietly back. Her pulse came fast as she started working her way back to the Ford, slipping among the trees. The soft loam kept her footsteps silent.

A third man, face congested with rage, tears pouring down his face, stepped out from a tree ahead of her. She recognized him as the young Inuit father from the diner, and he cradled a black hunting rifle. “Stop!”

She stood still, lifted her binocs. “I’m birdwatching, what—”

“I saw you drive up with them.”

A deep, brooding voice behind her said, “Those planes were going to stop the warming, save our land, save our people.”

She turned to the man pointing the shotgun, hands spread. “The only true way to do that is by stopping the oil companies, the corporations, the burning of fossil—”

The shotgun man barked, “That will not save us. Not save the Arctic. Our beautiful home.” He had a knotted face and burning eyes beneath heavy brows.

She talked fast, hands up, open palms toward him. “All that SkyShield nonsense won’t stop the oceans from turning acid. Only fossil—”

“Do what you can, when you can. We learn that up here.” This came from the tall man. They all had their guns trained on her now. Faces twitched, fingers trembled, fury pumped through them, but the bores pointing at her stayed as steady and implacable as their eyes.

“Okay, really, I’m on your side. And what are you doing? I was just—”

“Not birdwatching. You dropped those airplanes on our village. Our homes. Our families! We were out here getting rid of a bear that mauled a fisherman yesterday.”

“I didn’t mean, I, those guys you killed—they didn’t mean, they were just trying to stop the corporate—”

“You killed our families!” the big man said. The young father stood frozen, staring at her, full growing realization striking him mute.

She froze. What he said was true, but he could not see the big picture. What words could she use, what words could make them see why this had been necessary? “I, I—” and there she stalled, looking in the agonized eyes of the young father, windows upon a hell she could not imagine.

“Why?”
he asked, his voice a choked whisper. “I, I… need to know, for them…”

“I, we, we had to… We had to stop them. People won’t give up fossil fuels… until, until it gets… worse, until it hurts them where they live… and SkyShield would’ve slowed that down, made things too, too… easy for them. I saw that—we saw that—and this was, was the only way to make the world see that. People don’t do what’s right unless… they… have to…” Her words ran out, facing a man whose world had already ended. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, her knees felt unsteady. She wondered if she might faint. What to say, what words, what words could get her out of this…?

He finally spoke, hoarse, but clear.

“Principles over people. That’s what you chose, wasn’t it? You’ve never seen people as anything but objects to be moved… I learned about that at college—the word was ‘sociopathy,’ or ‘megalomania’— when I studied history… And not
one
of your
‘principles’
is worth a hair on my little Pitka’s head…”

He turned to the man with the shotgun, clearly their leader, an Elder, and said, “I know enough, now. A diseased mind, and a diseased heart. Her madness should not be allowed to spread, or to infect others.”

He stopped, gathered himself, and almost whispered,
“I speak for my family.”

The man with the shotgun glanced at the tall man with the rifle. They exchanged nods, quick words in a complex, guttural language she could not understand. The rifleman seemed to dissolve into the brush, steps fast and flowing, as he headed at a crouching dead run down to the shoreline and the waiting Zodiac.

She sucked in the clean sea air and thought about the eagle. She looked up for it in the sky but it was not there. Not there when she needed it.

It was the last thing she thought, yet it was only a mild regret.

I was watching a political news channel over coffee. The United Nations was debating in the General Assembly whether somebody should do something about restarting the Gulf Stream.

Sorry about that.

There were the usual paid ads denouncing Israel, the United States of America, Tsarstvo Russkoye, the Caliphate, and the North Pacific Gyre Republic. The last one bugged me; any country founded on the recovery of floating ocean garbage should get a chance, even if it feeds illegal immigrants to sharks. I mean, they
are
warned.

The representative from Eurocorp was arguing that people there were finally getting acclimated to the changes and that viewing the annual polar bear migration across the Baltic through Gdansk was becoming a significant part of the winter tourist trade. Then the representative from Brazil got up to complain that that was all well and good for Europe, but his country didn’t appreciate losing its rainforests in return. The Eurocorp rep bought rebuttal time to note that Brazil had done a fine job destroying the forests on its own. Brazil replied his government was considering formally calling the situation an Act of Aggression and Eurocorp called Brazil an Arse (he was English). Mutual threats of preemptive defensive aggression were tossed around freely. Sounded like 1914 all over again; just shoot the fat guy and get it over with.

The representative from Oz noted that the floods in the Murray-Darling Basin were more than offset by increased rainfall in northwestern New South Wales, and he was perfectly happy to let things continue as they were. The Eurocorp and Brazil reps huddled for a minute and then bought time to mutually condemn the Aussie for showing indifference to the rest of the world’s problems, to which the ‘roo said how does it feel to be on the receiving end for a change (he actually said they were a couple of poofters and should shut their gobs)?

The Central African Conglomeration formally joined Brazil in protest. The North African Conglomeration joined Australia, noting that the Sahara was shrinking with the increased rainfall and wondered idly if Europe still wanted to import grain from the Sahel? Europe objected to the veiled use of food as a weapon.

Watching the U.N. is more fun than watching your dog after you give him a mouthful of peanut butter. Like the General Assembly he just stands there and smacks his lips a lot, then makes a mess on the floor a while later. Insane, but another datum.

I turned off the box and ran up the periscope for a quick look around. Everything was calm, so I went back to the kitchen, put the tuna casserole in a stay-warm bag, and went upstairs. Pushed the door up and stepped out into a gorgeous summer Wyoming afternoon. The sky was clear and the breeze carried a scent of sagebrush and sulfur as I walked over to Gladys’ place.

I stepped on the buzzer. “That you, Hap?” she asked over the intercom.

“Last time I looked. Mind if I come in? Brought some hot dish for dinner.”

There was a click and Gladys said, “Come on, the door’s open.” I lifted the hatch and went down the stairs.

Gladys’s place was a duplicate of mine, so I wandered through the den/office to the kitchen, set the bag down and walked over to give her a friendly peck on the cheek. “Do you want to eat right away?” she asked. “Or should we look over the odd stuff first? I just finished brewing a pot of herbed tea.”

Gladys is about my age, tall and lean with short hair the color of freshly cracked iron. “Tea sounds nice,” I said, so she poured two big mugs, handed me one and walked out to the consoles in the office, me trailing. We usually take turns, one day her place, one day mine.

The folks at Langley have created some really nice software to help us sort things out, but a big part of the job is just sitting back and letting the information river flow over you while you keep your eyes open. Gladys is better at looking down from above, seeing bigger trends. I’m better at spotting the individual outliers. It works out well.

“Hm. Hap, have you been noticing the stock markets?”

“I’ve been watching commodities.” Pork bellies had been acting strangely lately, varying with pirate activity in the Malaccan Straits and groundwater levels in Arizona, p < 0.0005. “And did you catch the U.N. coverage this morning?”

“Getting crazy.” She sipped her tea. “The way the Footsie and Hang Seng are going I think maybe we should do something about those dust storms in central Asia.” She flicked the data over; I took a long look and agreed. Then we talked about where to grab or put and the probable consequences.

I guess people finally began to take the whole climate thing seriously when the north Asian tundra began rapidly thawing
en masse,
releasing enough methane to make it dangerous to strike a match anywhere between Vladivostok and the Ural Mountains. After the Great Siberian Fart, the Clathrate Catastrophe, melting Greenland and other interesting occurrences the world’s leaders finally decided to stop talking about studying the situation some more and start talking about doing something. At least the ones who still had countries above water.

When my father was a kid everything had to be studied some more. But after a while you’d better stop studying that mole on your nose and do something about it. Unless you have a vested interest in metastatic cancer-metastatic cancer is highly successful from the cancer’s point of view, after all. So we went from climate change to climate crisis to climate catastrophe, with the blame levels rising in a sort of log-normal fashion.

But in fairness to everyone, the real problem was the maddening lack of strong correlations between causes and effects. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere went up, temperatures went up. Sometimes. And then they’d stop going up. Scientists could point to irrefutable mechanistic proof that CO
₂
trapped heat. Skeptics would point out, like some anti-Galileos, that nevertheless, the temperature, she don’t a-move. So there were clouds, and water vapor, and El Camino, and North Atlantic Decadal Oscillations, and a million other things, until everyone tripped on their own models.

It seemed to take forever for some genius to finally figure out that the real problem wasn’t an incomplete understanding of cause and effect, but a weakening of cause and effect itself. The climate change couldn’t be properly modeled because a lot of it wasn’t our own doing. A big chunk of it was coming from somewhere else.

Someone was sending batches of bad climate back to us from the future.

That took a while to sink in. There was no basis in scientific thought for such a silly hypothesis, but that didn’t stop the government. DARPA set up a black study, convinced itself, then began looking for anyone with an ability to affect the weather. Remember, they also looked at remote viewing a while back. “When I was a little girl I would always say ‘Rain, rain, go away’ when I wanted to go out and play,” Gladys had told me. “And apparently it would go away. Wonder where I sent it.” Me, I had never really made the connection between undone homework and snow days. So while the scientists and engineers were working on adding sulfate particulates to the atmosphere or designing improbable mirrors for the Lagrange point, a few of us were learning how to export climate to the past or import it to the present.

People like Gladys and I move climate around. Somewhere uptime people like us are shoving their unwanted climate back and we’re trying to get some kind of balance while shoving it even farther back. So all that stuff about orbital eccentricity and Milankovich cycles aside, you might get a tweak about why the last Ice Age ended so quickly; glaciers are a good heat sink.

The biggest problem with moving anything through time is, as I said, that it messes up causality. This wasn’t obvious at first. Well, there were a few canaries who had done their Monte Casino simulations, but the point was that temporal swapping let people do something right away about a rapidly deteriorating situation (“Swap, Baby, Swap!” was the slogan early in the program). People who pointed to what appeared to be increasingly weird side effects were told the matter needed “more study.”

(It’s possible to spot periods where lots of climate swiping and swapping were going on by the increase in strange or inexplicable occurrences. You can only move so much climate to or from any given time before the probability side effects get bad, and then you end up with unbelievable stuff like frogs raining out of the sky or the First

World War.)

It turned out that the work was much more intuitive than analytical. Modifying the climate is more conducting an orchestra than solving differential equations. No offense to the mathematicians, but most of them don’t have a sense of rhythm. You have to look around and shuffle a lot of relatively minor changes instead of going for the brass ring in one big grab.

So they found us and teamed me and Gladys up and put us in the middle of nowhere in central Wyoming to work on it. We convinced them we had to be isolated from other humans for our amazing powers to work without interference. That was bull, of course. We both just liked the place and were a couple of loners who didn’t appreciate the thought of officious types hovering over our shoulders.

“I still feel bad about screwing up the deep ocean currents,” Gladys had remarked near the beginning.

“How could we know? To be fair, all we’re trying to do is unscrew a bigger mess someone else is laying on us.”

“Trouble is, it’s like trying to unscrew a virgin. The improbabilities are really starting to pile up.”

“And the ones uptime are unscrewing what we screw back in. We’re really getting into a positive feedback loop here.”

We were importing cool climate from the Maunder Minimum that month. It’s best to keep a balance between exporting heat and importing cold. (Too much net heat causes a spike in gasoline prices, among other things. Too much cold brings a rise in dissatisfied employees shooting their bosses. Don’t ask, I just work here.) It’s also less perturbing to move smaller amounts of climate over shorter intervals. We don’t use the Ice Ages anymore. Gulf Stream, cessation of,
vide supra.
Not to mention the mammoths.

What’s that hand up over there? Thermodynamics? Fine, smarty pants; try integrating over discontinuous time when t=0 changes partway through. Show your work. Dirac delta functions not allowed.

But in truth things were starting to get out of hand. The Indian monsoon had unexpectedly shifted three hundred miles west last year, and while we managed to more or less move it back, such a big swap meant three Category Five hurricanes hitting the southeast United States, Argentina declaring war on South Africa and the simultaneous introduction by six different fast food chains of deep-fried butter sticks (“Try ‘em with BACON!”). You had to wonder just what was going so wrong uptime.

A few hours later I leaned back and switched the console off. “I think we missed dinner,” I said.

Gladys was still looking at her box. “Would you mind putting it in the oven to warm up? I’d like to finish something here.”

“Sure.” I walked back to the kitchen, slid the casserole in the oven, and set it for fifteen minutes at three hundred. Then I picked up a cookbook and sat down, looking for some interesting new recipes.

Gladys eventually followed the scent of food into the kitchen.

“You like tofu?” I asked.

“Only if it’s free-range.”

“Ah, well, too bad. How about banana-nut bread?”

“With candied cherries I can eat a whole loaf.”

“Excellent. Tomorrow.” I spooned casserole onto two plates and slid one over to her.

She took a bite and nodded. “Good.” We ate in silence for a while, which was unusual. Something was bothering her. “Hap…”

I looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

“We’re running out of wiggle room.”

I nodded. Causality was beginning to have kittens and we were rapidly being painted into a corner.

“There was a bulletin just before I came in. The tsar announced he’s converting to Judaism.”

“What? Reform?”

“No, Orthodox.”

“Oy.” Some things are improbable, but now we were rapidly sliding over to the impossible. I looked around. “You know, we can probably hold out here for quite a while if we have to.”

She nodded. “Unless the Yellowstone caldera blows.”

“And what are the odds of
that?”
I asked without thinking. Then we both laughed.

I ladled out seconds and we ate some more. “I have an idea,” Gladys finally said.

“Excellent. That makes one of us.” I was thinking about defense. One of the things I had insisted on was having guns, and I had kept up my marksmanship by plinking cans and the occasional varmint.

“Seriously. It’s a little out there—okay, it’s way out there.”

“Given what we do for a living, I find it hard to think of
anything
truly way out there.”

“Good point. The problem is that we keep shuffling improbability around along with climate through time. The whole thing is just getting harder and harder to balance.”

“Agreed.” I let Gladys talk; she’s the smart one.

“So what if we could uncouple the improbability from time?”

I sat there. Nothing happened. “Explain, please.”

So she did, and suddenly this great big clue-by-four came down and whapped me in the head. “Beautiful!” I laughed. “Just beautiful!” I leaned over and gave her a kiss. A real one. Ooooh, it suddenly hit me that we had some spooning to do when everything was done. “Okay, let’s get Goddard and Langley on a three-way.”

“It could backfire, you know.”

“Sure. But we’re going to try it anyway, aren’t we?”

“Yes. So I guess it’s only polite to tell them first.”

Goddard was intrigued. Langley was cautious. Needed “more study.”

Gladys was adamant and I backed her up. “Look,” she finally said, “We’ll try a small test and see if there is any measurable result.” Goddard agreed that their instruments would probably be able to detect any transfer. Langley finally conceded there was no additional harm in trying, given how things were going. “Okay,” Gladys finished, “Leave us alone for a while. Then we’ll give it a go at twenty-hundred hours.” She flicked off the box. “Dessert?” she asked me.