Green Earth

GREEN EARTH

THE SCIENCE IN THE CAPITAL TRILOGY

FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN

FIFTY DEGREES BELOW

SIXTY DAYS AND COUNTING

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

Copyright

HarperVoyager an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015

Forty Signs of Rain copyright © 2004, 2015 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Fifty Degrees Below copyright © 2005, 2015 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Sixty Days and Counting copyright © 2007, 2015 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover design and illustration: Wes Youssi/M80 Design, based on images © Shutterstock.com

Kim Stanley Robinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting were originally published separately in hardcover and in different form in the UK by HarperVoyager in 2004, 2005, and 2007.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008139544

Ebook Edition © November 2015 ISBN: 9780008139551

Version: 2015-10-13

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction by the Author

PART ONE: FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN

Chapter 1: The Buddha Arrives

Chapter 2: In the Hyperpower

Chapter 3: Intellectual Merit

Chapter 4: Science in the Capital

Chapter 5: Athena on the Pacific

Chapter 6: The Capital in Science

Chapter 7: Tit for Tat

Chapter 8: A Paradigm Shift

Chapter 9: Trigger Event

Chapter 10: Broader Impacts

PART TWO: FIFTY DEGREES BELOW

Chapter 11: Primate in Forest

Chapter 12: Abrupt Climate Change

Chapter 13: Back to Khembalung

Chapter 14: Is There a Technical Solution?

Chapter 15: Autumn in New York

Chapter 16: Optimodal

Chapter 17: The Cold Snap

Chapter 18: Always Generous

Chapter 19: Leap Before You Look

Chapter 20: Primavera Porteño

PART THREE: SIXTY DAYS AND COUNTING

Chapter 21: A New Reality

Chapter 22: Cut to the Chase

Chapter 23: Going Feral

Chapter 24: The Technological Sublime

Chapter 25: Undecided

Chapter 26: Sacred Space

Chapter 27: Emerson for the Day

Chapter 28: Terraforming Earth

Chapter 29: The Dominoes Fall

Chapter 30: You Get What You Get

Praise

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books by Kim Stanley Robinson

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Peter Matthiessen, who died in 2014, was a great writer. His non-fiction is superb, and his novels are even better: At Play In the Fields of the Lord is an epic thing, and Far Tortuga is brilliant and moving, one of my favorite novels. You read those books, you’ve lived more lives.

His third great novel has an unusual publishing history. It first appeared as a trilogy, in volumes called Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone By Bone. Then about ten years later it reappeared in a single volume, considerably compressed by Matthiessen, titled Shadow Country. When I picked up that book in a bookstore and read Matthiessen’s foreword explaining what he had done, I immediately said to myself, “I want to do that with my climate trilogy.”

This reaction surprised me. I had not been aware that I harbored any longing to revise those books. When I finish a novel I generally move on without a lot of looking back. On completion I feel a glow, as when finishing any job, but it’s also a little sad, because the characters stop talking to me. It’s like being Calvin and watching Hobbes turn back into a stuffed doll. Could be tragic, but in my case there is a solution, which is simply to start another novel. That’s what I do, and on it goes.

But in the case of my climate trilogy, which was published between 2004 and 2007 under the titles Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting, it appeared that I still had the urge to tinker. After some reflection it began to make sense. Almost fifteen years have passed since I started that project, and in that time our culture’s awareness of climate change has grown by magnitudes, the issue becoming one of the great problems of the age. In this changed context, I had the feeling that quite a few of my trilogy’s pages now spent time telling readers things they already knew. Some of that could surely be cut, leaving the rest of the story easier to see.

Also, my original idea had been to write a realist novel as if it were science fiction. This approach struck me as funny, and also appropriate, because these days we live in a big science fiction novel we are all writing together. If you want to write a novel about our world now, you’d better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.

So I felt then and still feel that my plan was a good one; but there was a problem in it that I didn’t fully gauge while I was writing. Science fiction famously builds its fictional worlds by slipping in lots of details that help the reader to see things that don’t yet exist, like bubble cities under the ice of Europa. Just as famously, novels set in the present don’t have to do this. If I mention the National Mall in Washington D.C., you can conjure it up from your past exposure to it. I don’t have to describe the shallowness of the reflecting pools or the height of the Washington Monument, or identify the quarries where that monument’s stone came from. But the truth is I like those kinds of details, and describing Washington D.C. as if it were orbiting Aldebaran was part of my fun. So I did it, but afterward it seemed possible that occasionally I might have gone too far. Every novel is like a ship and has its own Plimsoll line, and if you load it past that line, a storm can sink it. Readers may be inclined to abandon ship, or refuse to get on in the first place.

So with those considerations in mind, I went through my text and cut various extraneous details, along with any excess verbiage I could find (and I could). Inspired by Matthiessen, who compared his middle volume to a dachsund’s belly, and shortened his original 1,500 pages to 900, I compressed about 1,100 pages to about 800. Nothing important was lost in this squishing, and the new version has a better flow, as far as I can tell. Also, crucially, it now fits into one volume, and is thereby better revealed for what it was all along, which is a single novel.

If anyone wants the longer version of this story, it will always exist in the original three books. That trilogy was sometimes called The Capital Code, but more often Science In the Capital, the title I preferred. Those titles can continue to designate the original trilogy. This shorter version is called Green Earth, I’m happy to say. It’s a chapter title in my Blue Mars, and I always wanted to put it on a book, as it’s a very nice description of what we can achieve in the coming centuries, if we succeed in building a sustainable civilization. We haven’t done that yet, but now’s the time to start. This novel is one version of what that start might look like.

It’s a story about many things: climate change, science administration and politics, Buddhism, biotechnology and investment capital, homelessness, sociobiology, surveillance, life in Washington D.C., life in a treehouse, life with a fractious toddler. A kitchen sink makes an appearance. With that much thrown in, it should not be surprising that the story “predicted” quite a few things that have since come to pass; near-future science fiction always does that.

Still, while working on this version I was startled pretty often by such pseudo-predictions. That the storm that wrecks the East Coast was named Sandy is strange enough to be one of J. W. Dunne’s examples of precognition in An Experiment With Time—in other words, a coincidence, but quite a coincidence.

The other good calls, especially about climate and weather, were less accidental. As global temperatures rise, there will be more energy in the atmosphere, and more wild weather will ensue. So, Washington D.C. being so low-lying, whenever a big storm hits that area the Metro will flood, and I will get emails that are surprised or even congratulatory; it’s happened two or three times already. Recently the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began quietly building a berm across the National Mall, to limit the flooding there sure to come. That will avert the final scene of Forty Signs of Rain, maybe, but Hurricane Katrina’s inundation of New Orleans occurred about a year after the book came out, and showed what could happen when a Corps of Engineers system is overwhelmed.

Since then some of the Sundarban islands have gone under for good, as happens to Khembalung in Fifty Degrees Below. And speaking of fifty below, shifts in the jet stream will keep bringing Arctic winters directly south onto the east coast of North America. It’s just happened two winters in a row, and as I write this, it’s colder in northern Virginia than it is in northern Alaska, hitting ten degrees below zero. Fifty below no longer seems so radical, although admittedly the numerology of my titles forced that number far down. But we’ll see. For sure we’ll be experiencing atmospheric rivers and polar vortexes; neither phrase existed when I wrote the book, but the phenomena did, and my story describes them both.

More disturbing, perhaps, is the way the National Security Agency’s recently revealed surveillance program has confirmed and even trumped this book’s spy plot. There were signs when I was writing that this kind of thing was going on, but I thought I was exaggerating it for satiric effect. Not at all. You are a person of interest, your calls are recorded, and computer programs are rating your potential danger to the system. And elections? Cross your fingers!

Anyway, with one thing or another, this book will continue to look prescient for a while longer. Already it’s turned into a peculiar mix of historical fiction, contemporary fiction, and science fiction, in the sense that some of it has already happened, some is happening now, and some of it will happen soon. Some of it will never happen, which is the wild card in the mix, and one of the things that makes it fiction. But fiction doesn’t have to come true to make it useful.

It’s paying attention to science that helped create whatever pseudo-predictions the book may contain. Science often tells us things we couldn’t see as individuals, and fiction can benefit from that infusion of artificial intelligence. Yes, science itself is the genius AI that we fear to create; it’s already up and running. Attend to it and act on what you learn. It’s the science fiction way.

The acknowledgments for all three volumes, now combined at the back of this book, show how much help I had along the way, and I want to thank everyone again. I also want to reiterate how much I owe to the National Science Foundation. They sent me to Antarctica as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers Program in 1995, and that experience began this whole sequence of stories. After that they invited me to their headquarters often, first to serve on panels selecting subsequent groups of Antarctic artists, then to give talks and confer. Several NSF scientists spoke to me about their work in interesting ways, and Rita Colwell, the agency’s first woman director, told me things that helped me to write Diane Chang’s story. People there have been generous, and I hope it’s an association that will continue.

At one point after Forty Signs of Rain was published, I went to the NSF building in Arlington to give a lunchtime talk. My Antarctic patron Guy Guthridge had put up flyers next to the elevators that said NSF SAVES THE WORLD! and when the time came, the lecture hall was full. I began by reading the scene where my characters go to a brown-bag lunch talk in the NSF building. As I read the passage that describes those lunches, about people attending one more talk, even after all the years and all the grant applications—just out of a sense of curiosity, that basic emotion at the heart of scientific enterprise—I looked up from the page and sure enough, there they were again. I almost got dizzy, it was so circular. We laughed a lot that day, and though I know that the people there thought and still think that the idea of NSF saving the world is ludicrous, it is nevertheless true that they have good esprit de corps, they punch above their weight, they do good work. I think of them with admiration and gratitude, and as a crucial part of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The scientific community they help to fund and organize may indeed have a big role in saving the world, so reading a story that describes us doing it can be encouraging. At the least it can make you laugh. I was told that one senior person at NSF finished reading the trilogy and immediately sold his house and moved into a camper in a trailer park. That’s taking things too far, probably, but I like the impulse, because we read novels to help create our sense of what the world means, to mentally travel in other people’s lives, and to get some laughs. So whether you light out for the territory afterward or not, read on, reader, and may this story help and entertain you. And thanks.

Kim Stanley Robinson, February 2015

CHAPTER 1

THE BUDDHA ARRIVES

The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight. A fierce inundation of photons—on average, 342 joules per second per square meter. 4185 joules (one Calorie) will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree C. If all this energy were captured by the Earth’s atmosphere, its temperature would rise by ten degrees C in one day.

Luckily much of it radiates back to space. How much depends on albedo and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, both of which vary over time.

A good portion of Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, is created by its polar ice caps. If polar ice and snow were to shrink significantly, more solar energy would stay on Earth. Sunlight would penetrate oceans previously covered by ice, and warm the water. This would add heat and melt more ice, in a positive feedback loop.

The Arctic Ocean ice pack reflects back out to space a few percent of the total annual solar energy budget. When the Arctic ice pack was first measured by nuclear submarines in the 1950s, it averaged thirty feet thick in midwinter. By the end of the century it was down to fifteen. Then one August the ice broke up into large tabular bergs, drifting on the currents, colliding and separating, leaving broad lanes of water open to the continuous polar summer sunlight. The next year the breakup started in July, and at times more than half the surface of the Arctic Ocean was open water. The third year, the breakup began in May.

That was last year.

Weekdays always begin the same. The alarm goes off and you are startled out of dreams that you immediately forget. Predawn light in a dim room. Stagger into a hot shower and try to wake up all the way. Feel the scalding hot water on the back of your neck. Fragment of a dream, you were deep in some problem set now escaping you, just as you tried to escape it in the dream. Duck down the halls of memory—gone. Dreams don’t want to be remembered.

Evaluate the night’s sleep: not so good. Anna Quibler was exhausted already. Joe had cried twice, and though it was Charlie who had gotten up to reassure him, as part of conveying to Joe that Mom would never again visit him at night, Anna had of course woken up too, and vaguely heard Charlie’s reassurances: “Hey. Joe. What’s up. Go back to sleep, buddy, nothing gets to happen until morning, this is pointless this wailing, good night damn it.”

After that she had tossed and turned, trying not to think of work. In general Anna’s thoughts had a tropism toward work. Last night had been no different.

Shower over, she dried and dressed in three minutes. Downstairs she filled a lunch box for her older boy, same as always, as required: peanut butter sandwich, five carrots, apple, chocolate milk, yogurt, roll of lunch meat, cheese stick, cookie. As she got the coldpack out of the freezer she saw the neat rows of plastic bottles full of her frozen milk, there for Charlie to thaw and feed to Joe during the day. That reminded her—not that she would have forgotten much longer, given how full her breasts felt—that she had to nurse the bairn before she left. She clumped back upstairs and lifted Joe out of his crib, sat on the couch beside it. “Hey love, time for some sleepy nurses.”

Joe glommed on to her while still almost entirely asleep. With his eyes closed he looked like an angel. He was getting bigger but she could still cradle him in her arms and watch him curl into her like a new infant. Closer to two than one now, and a regular bruiser, a wild man who wearied her; but not now. The warm sensation of being suckled put her body back to sleep, but a part of her mind was already at work, and so she kept to the schedule, detached him and shifted him around to the other breast for four more minutes. When they were done he would go back to sleep and snooze happily until about nine, Charlie said.

She hefted him back into his crib, buttoned up and kissed all her boys lightly on the head. Charlie mumbled “Call me, be careful.” Then she was down the stairs and out the door, her big work bag over her shoulder.

The cool air on her face woke her fully for the first time that day. It was May now but the mornings still had a bit of chill to them, a delicious sensation given the humid heat to come. Truck traffic roared south. Splashes of sunlight struck the blue sheen of the windows on the skyscrapers up at Bethesda Metro.

Anna passed the Metro elevator kiosk to extend her walk by fifty yards, then turned and clumped down the stairs to the bus stop. Then down the escalator into the dimness of the great tube of ribbed concrete. Card on turnstile, thwack as the triangular barriers disappeared, down the escalator to the tracks. No train there, none coming immediately, so she sat down on a concrete bench, opened her tablet, and began to study one of the jackets, as they still called them: the grant proposals that the National Science Foundation received at a rate of fifty thousand a year. “Algorithmic Analysis of Palindromic Codons as Predictors of a Gene’s Protein Expression.” The proposal’s algorithm had shown some success in predicting which proteins any given gene sequence would express. As genes expressed a huge variety of proteins by unknown ways, this would be very useful. Anna was dubious, but genomics was not her field. It would be one to give to Frank Vanderwal. She noted it as such and queued it in a forward to him.

The arrival of a train, the getting on and finding of a seat, the change of trains at Metro Center, the getting off at the Ballston stop in Arlington, Virginia: all were actions accomplished without conscious thought, as she read proposals. The first one still struck her as the most interesting of the morning’s bunch. She would be interested to hear what Frank made of it.

Coming out of a Metro station is the same everywhere: up a long escalator, toward an oval of gray sky and the heat of the day. Emerge abruptly into a busy urban scene.

The Ballston stop’s distinction was that the escalator topped out in a vestibule leading to the glass doors of a building. Anna entered this building, went to the open-walled shop selling pastries and sandwiches, and bought a lunch to eat later at her desk. Then she went back out to Starbucks.

This particular Starbucks was graced by a staff maniacally devoted to speed and precision. Anna loved to see it; she liked efficiency anywhere she found it, and more so as she grew older. That a group of young people could turn what was potentially a very boring job into a kind of strenuous athletic performance struck her as admirable. Now it cheered her again to move rapidly forward in the long queue, and see the woman at the computer spot her when she was two back in line and call out to her teammates, “Tall latte half-caf, nonfat, no foam!” and then, when Anna got to the front of the line, ask her if she wanted anything else today. It was easy to smile as she shook her head.

Then outside again and around to the NSF building. Inside she showed her badge to security, went to the elevators.

Anna liked the NSF building’s interior. The structure was hollow, featuring a gigantic central atrium, an octagonal space that extended from floor to skylight, twelve stories above. This empty space, as big as some buildings, was walled by the interior windows of all the NSF offices. Its upper part was occupied by a large hanging mobile, made of curved metal bars painted in primary colors. The ground floor was occupied by various small businesses facing the atrium—pizza place, hairstylist, travel agency, bank outlet.

A disturbance caught Anna’s eye. Across the atrium there was a flurry of maroon, a flash of brass, and then a resonant low chord sounded, filling the big space with a vibrating blaaa, as if the atrium itself were a kind of huge horn.

A bunch of Tibetans, it looked like: men and women wearing belted maroon robes and yellow winged caps. Some played long straight horns, others thumped drums or swung censers, dispensing clouds of sandalwood smoke. They crossed the atrium chanting and swirling, all in majestic slow motion.