And the years will not return. “Yes, I have changed,” she said. “You too, no doubt, but I more.” Sometimes, lying awake at night, I miss the girl I was. Less her heedless health, dizzying joyfulness, even the quick sharp sorrows, than her dreams that knew no bounds.
”Well, I’ll listen to you, dear,” she went on. “Then will you listen to me? While we can . . . Though I’d rather we talked about what’s happened to us, like old friends come back together at last.”
And for the last time, she foreknew.
2
Laurinda Ashcroft did not much revise her global broadcast later that day. It was one among several by well-known interfaces, intended over a period of years to make the danger clear and explain Terra Central’s plan for coping. She had prepared most of it beforehand, the usual visuals plus occasional virtuals to invoke every sense.
Watching, you saw Earth revolve around the sun. You saw her orbit drawn in three dimensions, a golden track against blackness and the stars. You saw how she, her moon, and her sister globes interplayed, a dance through billions of years wherein gravitation called the measures, subtly but inexorably. You saw the slow cycle of changeable eccentricity and obliquity, how it set the patterns of lightfall across the planet and how she responded with her air, seas, clouds, rains, snow, and ice.
Since the Arctic Ocean became landlocked, the glaciers had some and gone and come again. In the great winters, northern Europe, half of North America, and huge tracts elsewhere lay under ice whose cliffs reared as high as two kilometers; drowned lands rose anew as sea level dropped a hundred meters; forests withered and died while south of them marshlands came into being and new forests overran the savannahs. Yes, life adapted. If some species suffered, others flourished. But this was on a millennial timescale, scant help to humans and their works.
The next glaciation was overdue. They had unwittingly delayed its beginnings with their emission of greenhouse gases. Now that was past, together with the overpopulation that brought it about, and in any event would not have sufficed. Now more snow fell in winter than melted in summer. Meter by meter, faster each year, the glaciers crept down from the Pole and the mountains.
”You have surely heard what we must do, and soon, before it is too late. Thicken the greenhouse. Thin the clouds. Darken the snows. Make Earth keep more of the sun’s warmth than she can unaided. But perhaps you don’t yet know the magnitude of this, the number of the centuries, or the delicacy and exactness underneath the enormous forces we will call on. Let me show you a little.”
Again, visuals and virtuals. Carbon black strewn over the Arctic, tonne after colloidal tonne, repeated year after year as the layer washes away or sinks from sight. Immense electric discharges high aloft, to force rainfalls so that less light is cast back into space. Mats of brown algal weed carpeting the seas by millions of square kilometers; the care and feeding of these living artifacts. Underwater detonations to break up beds of methane hydrate and release the gas into the atmosphere. Forests set afire and afterward only grasses allowed, for they store less carbon than trees do. Holes drilled down into the very mantle of the planet; nuclear explosions to goad volcanoes into spewing forth carbon dioxide and water vapor more copiously than fossil fuels ever did. The new industries required, their claim on resources, their constructs and monitors everywhere.
”Yes, this will be an Earth very different from the Earth we thought we had restored for ourselves.” Laurinda leaned forward, as if each person watching sat before her in the flesh. “But it will be far less changed than the Ice Age would change it. Our world will still be green, rich, kindly, from rim to rim of the Polar oceans. We will keep many of our woodlands, open waters, pure snowpeaks. And on the new prairies, what wildflowers will bloom, what herds will graze!”
She gave them the images, the sounds, the sense of wind and fragrances, simulated but as vivid as reality. Idealized, yes. But not dishonest. We can have such places.