Nicolaus said grimly, Why did nobody alert us to this before? Why did it take you to dig this out? Whats going on up there on the Moon?
But it wasnt the Moon that was the problem, it seemed; it was the muddled head of the young scientist who had figured all this out.
Eugene Mangles, Miriam said.
Yes, Siobhan said. Hes brilliant, but not quite connected to the rest of us. We need him. But we have to dig the bad news out of his head.
Nicolaus snapped, And what else isnt he telling us?
Miriam held up a hand. Siobhanjust give me a headline. How bad will this be?
The modeling is still uncertain, Siobhan said. But that much energyit would strip away the atmosphere altogether. She shrugged. The oceans will boil, vaporize. The Earth itself will survive: the rocky planet. Life in the deep rocks, kilometers down, might live through it. Extremophile bacteria, heat lovers.
But not us, Nicolaus said.
Not us. And nothing of the surface biosphere, on the land, in the air, or the seas. In the silence that followed, Siobhan said, Im sorry. This is a terrible thing to have brought home from the Moon. I dont know any way to soften this.
They fell silent again, trying to digest what she had said.
Nicolaus brought Miriam a cup of tea on a monogrammed saucer. It was Earl Grey, the way she preferred it. The old myth that the British were addicted to their watery, milky cuppas was at least half a century out of date, but Miriam, a Prime Minister of Europe and with a French father, always took great pains not to offend the sensibilities of anybody on this still residually Euro-skeptic island. So she took her Earl Grey hot and without milk, out of sight of the cameras.
In this silent pause for thought, with her teacup cradled in her hands, Miriam was drawn to the window, and the city.
The silver stripe of the Thames cut through Londons geography, as it always had. To the east the City, still second only to Moscow as a Eurasian financial center, was a clutter of skyscrapers. The City occupied much of what had once been Roman London, and in her time as a student here Miriam had once walked the line of the wall of that primal settlement, a trail that ran a few kilometers from the Tower to Blackfriars Bridge. When the Romans had gone the Saxons had developed a new town to the west of the old walls, the area now known as the West End. With the great expansion of the cities that had followed the Industrial Revolution, those complicated knots of multilayered history had been drowned by new suburban development, until London was the heart of a vast conurbation that today reached out as far as Brighton in the south and Milton Keynes to the north.
The basic geography of London hadnt changed much since the 1950s, perhaps. But a witness from that receding age would have been astonished by the glimmering width of the Thames, and the massive flanks of the new flood barriers that could be dimly glimpsed past the shoulders of buildings. The Thames had been tamed over the centuries, pushed into a deepening, narrowing channel, its tributaries bricked over, its floodplain built on. Until the turn of the century, London had got away with it. But the worlds climate shifts had brought an inexorable rise in sea levels, and humans had been forced to retreat before the Thamess determined retaking of its ancient territories.
The reality of climate change and its effects were undeniable, and a day-to-day political reality for Miriam. Remarkably the argument about the cause of it all still continued. But that decades-old debate was moot now, as attention had gradually switched to the need to fix things. There was a will to act, Miriam thought, a gladdening and growing realization that things had gone too far, that something must be done.
But it was surprisingly hard to focus that energy. Long-term demographic changes had led to an aging of the population in the West: more than half of all Western Europeans and Americans were now over sixty-five, mostly unproductive, and conservative with it. Meanwhile the interconnectedness of the world had culminated with the great UNESCO program to equip every twelve-year-old on the globe with a phone of her own. The result was a detachment from traditional political structures among the young and middle-aged, who, educated and interconnected, often showed more loyalty to others like them around the world than to the nations of which they were nominally citizens.
If you looked at the world as a whole, this was probably the most truly democratic, educated, and enlightened age in history. The growth of a literate, interconnected elite certainly made major wars a lot less likely in the future. But it did make it hard to get anything doneespecially when tough choices had to be made.
And it seemed that tough choices faced Miriam now.
At fifty-three, Miriam Grec was in her second year as Prime Minister of the Eurasian Union. She was the senior political figure across a swath of the Old World that stretched from the Atlantic coast of Ireland to the Pacific coast of Russia, and from Scandinavia in the north to Israel in the south. It was an empire no Caesar or Khan could have contemplatedbut Miriam was no emperor. Enmeshed in the complicated federal politics of the young Union, buffeted by tensions between the great power blocs that dominated the world of the mid-twenty-first century, and having to cope with more primitive forces of religion, ethnicity, and residual nationalism, she sometimes felt as if she were trapped in a spiderweb.
Of course, she would never have swapped places with her only nominal superior in Eurasia, the President, who had the power to do nothing but launch spaceplanes and visit the sick. However, the present incumbent was well suited by heredity and upbringing to such a rolethough there had been universal astonishment at his election. Perhaps it said something about the yearning of the people for tradition and stability that the third democratically elected President of Eurasia was the King of Great Britain
Miriam tried to assess Siobhan McGorran. The Astronomer Royal, a rather earnest woman with a dark Celtic intensity, had clearly taken her mission to provide Miriam with a briefing on the events of June 9 very seriously, including that trip to the Moon, which Miriam rather envied. But Miriams problem was that Siobhan was not the first person to have stood before her and pronounced on global doom and gloom.
This was a dangerous century, the experts kept saying. Climate change, eco-collapse, demographic changesa bottleneck for humankind, some called it. Miriam accepted that basic view. But already it was clear that some of the very worst projections from the beginning of this century of change hadnt come to pass. Miriam had learned that she had to apply a filter, a very unscientific and inexpert screen of judgment, to sort the wheat from the chaff, a judgment based as much on her impression of the character of the bringer of each bit of bad news as on the content of what she had to say.
That was why she was coming to think that she would have to take Siobhan McGorran very seriously indeed.
Nicolaus said, Of course well have to check everything out.
But you do believe me. Siobhan seemed neither gratified nor humble; she just wanted to get on with the job, Miriam thought.
But what a dreadful job that was. Miriam banged her small fist on the tabletop. Damn, damn.
Siobhan turned to her. Miriam?
You know, in my job things generally look grim, day to day. Here we are right in the throat of this bottleneck of history. We make mistakes, we squabble, we never agree, we take one step back for every two forward. And yet were finding our way through. It was true. America, for instance, which had taken more of a beating on June 9 than any other region, had already recovered substantially, and was now even sending aid convoys out around the world. I believe that were coming together as a species as a result of our coping with all these crises. Growing up, if you like. We work together, we help each other. We take care of the place we live.