Hieroglyph (61 page)

A few meters away she saw the fine lines of the thermoelectric mesh on the seabed. There were fewer creatures in the methane-saturated water. Methane gas was coming up from the holes in the melting permafrost on the seabed—there were even places you could see bubbles. Before her a creature swam into focus: a human-built machine intelligence, one of the brolly's family unit. Its small, cylindrical body, with its flanges and long snout, looked like a fish on an alien planet. It was injecting a rich goo of nutrients (her very own recipe) for methane-eating bacteria. She was startled by how natural it looked in the deep water. “Eat well, my hearties,” she told her favorite life-forms. Methanotrophs were incredibly efficient at metabolizing methane, using pathways that were only now being elucidated. Most of the processes could not be duplicated in labs. So much was still unknown—hell, they'd found
five
new species of the bacteria since the project had started. Methanotrophs, like most living beings, didn't exist in isolation, but in consortia. The complex web of interdependencies determined behavior and chemistry.

“If methane-eating bacteria sop up most of the methane, it will help slow global warming,” she said into the recorder. “It will buy time until humanity cuts its carbon dioxide emissions. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO
₂
. Although it doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long, too much methane in the atmosphere might excite a positive feedback loop—more methane, more warming, more thawing of permafrost, more methane . . . a vicious cycle that might tip the world toward catastrophic warming.” Whether that could happen was still a point of argument among scientists, but the methane plumes now known to be coming off the seabed all over the shallow regions of the Arctic were enough to worry anyone whose head wasn't buried in the sand.

Maybe her bacteria could help save the world. With enough nutrients, they and their communities of cooperative organisms might take care of much of the methane; in the meantime the thermoelectric mesh was an experiment to see whether cooling down the hot spots might slow the outgassing. The energy generated by the mesh was captured in batteries, which had to be replaced when at capacity. The instrument array measured biogeochemical data and sent it back to the brolly.

Her drysuit computer beeped. It was time to return to the surface—or else she would run out of oxygen. She turned off the camera-recorder and swam slowly and carefully toward the light. “Message from Tom,” her genie said. “Not urgent but interesting. Two messages from Million Eyes, one to you, asking about the video, the other a news item. A ballet dancer in Estonia saw an illegal oil and gas exploration vessel messing around the Laptev Sea. There's a furor. Message from your cousin Maggie in Iqaluit, marked Personal. She's in San Francisco, wondering where you are.”

Damn. Hadn't she told Maggie she was going on an expedition? Maggie hardly ever left Canada so the trip to San Francisco must be something special.

“I'm coming up,” she said, just as she felt a numbing pain sear into her left calf. The cold was coming in through a leak, a tear in the suit; her drysuit computer beeped a warning. Her leg cramped horribly. She looked up, willing herself not to panic—the surface seemed impossibly far away, and the cold was filling her body, making her chest contract with pain. She moved her arms as strongly as she could. She must get up to the surface before the cold spread—she had had a brush with hypothermia before. But as she went up with excruciating slowness she knew at once that she was going to die here, and a terror came upon her.
Lucie,
she said.
Lucie, forgive me, I love you, I love you
. Her arms were tired, her legs like jelly, and the cold was in her bones, and a part of her wanted simply to surrender to oblivion. Frigg was chirping frantically in her ear—calling for rescue, not that there was anyone in the area who could get to her in time—and then a voice cut in, and her grandmother said,
Bless you and be careful up there, I'm praying for you
. This was really odd because her grandmother was dead, and the accent was strange. But the voice spoke with such clarity and concern, and there was such an emphasis on
be careful
—and weren't there kitchen sounds in the background, a pan banging in the sink, so incongruously ordinary and familiar?—that she was jolted from the darkness of spirit that had descended on her. Her arms seemed to be the only part of her body still under her control, and although they felt like lead, she began to move them again.

Tom's voice cut in, frantic. “I'm coming, I'm coming as fast as I can, hold on,” and Mahmoud, more calmly, “I've contacted the
Kolmogorov
for their helicopter—and the Coast Guard.” But the helicopter had been sent over to a station in Norway that very afternoon. She saw her death before her with astonishing clarity. Then she felt something lift her bodily—how could Tom get here so soon?—an enormous white shadow loomed, a smile on the bulbous face—a whale. A
beluga?
She felt the solid body of the whale below her, tried to get a hold of the smooth flesh, but she needn't have worried, because it was pushing her up with both balance and strength, until she broke the water's surface near the boat. Hauling herself up the rungs of the ladder proved to be impossible: she was shaking violently, and her legs felt numb. The whale pushed her up until all she had to do was to tumble over the rail onto the deck. She collapsed on the deck, pulled off her mask, sobbing, breathing huge gulps of cold air. Her suit beeped shrilly.

“Get dry NOW,” Frigg said in Mahmoud's voice, or maybe it was Mahmoud. She half crawled into the cabin, peeled everything off, and huddled under a warm shower until the shivering slowed. A searing pain in both legs told her that blood was circulating again. There was a frayed tear in the drysuit—had it caught on a nail as she was pulling it out of the cupboard? So much for damning protocol, something she never did if a colleague or student was involved. Her left calf still ached, and the tears wouldn't stop. At last she toweled off and got into warm clothes, with warm gelpacks under her armpits and on her stomach. The medbot checked her vital signs while hot cocoa bubbled.

“Frigg, tell Tom and Mahmoud not to come, my vitals are fine,” she said, but her voice shook. “Tell them to call off the rescue.” Her chest still ached, but as she sipped the cocoa she started to feel more normal. After a while she could stand without feeling she was going to fall over.

She stepped gingerly out on the deck. The sun, already low in the sky, was falling slowly into the ocean like a ripe peach. The first stars sequined the coming Arctic night. The belugas swam around the boat. She finished her cocoa in a few gulps and felt a shadow of strength return to her. A whale popped its head out of the water next to her boat and looked at her with friendly curiosity.

She put her arms between the railing bars and touched the whale's head. It was smooth as a hard-boiled egg. “
Qilalugaq,
” she whispered, and tears ran down her cheeks, and her shoulders shook. “Thank you, thank you for saving my life. Did
Ittuq
send you?” She realized she was speaking Inuktitut, the familiar syllables coming back as though she had never left home.
Ittuq
, she whispered. She had been too young when her grandfather died, too shocked to let herself mourn fully. Now, thirty-nine years later, the tears flowed.

At last she stood, leaning against the rail, spent, and waved to the pod as it departed.

Later that night, when she had eaten her fill of hot chicken soup, she talked to Tom on video. He was touchingly grateful that she was all right and excited about the whale rescue. Irene said, “Don't go around broadcasting it, will you?” She had no desire to see her foolishness go viral on the Internet. Fortunately Tom had something exciting of his own to share.

“Look!” he said. “This is from this afternoon.” A photo appeared on the side of the screen. There lay the enormous bulk of the artificial iceberg to which his boat was docked. An irregular heap lay atop it.

“Polar bear,” he said, grinning. “Must have been swimming for a while, looking for a rest stop. Poor guy's sleeping off a late lunch. I tossed him my latest catch of fish.”

“Stay away from him!” Irene said sharply. “Wild animals aren't cute house pets—remember your briefing!”

“You're a fine one to talk, Irene.” He grinned again, and then, anticipating her protests, “Yes, yes, I know, don't worry. If I go aboard the berg with the bear on it, some kid somewhere is going to notice and send me a message. This morning I stepped out without my snow goggles and a twelve-year-old from Uzbekistan messaged my genie. Thanks to Million Eyes you can hardly take a shit in peace . . . er, sorry . . .”

“It's not
that
bad.” She couldn't help smiling. Good for the kid in Uzbekistan. Tom could be absentminded. The screen image of the fake berg was impossibly white. It was coated with a high-albedo nanostructured radiative paint that sent infrared right back into the atmosphere, while leaving the surface cool to the touch.

“Another interesting thing happened today,” he said, with the kind of casualness that betrayed suppressed excitement. “You know we have eight brollies on Big Lump?” Big Lump was the largest iceberg in a flotilla about fifty kilometers north of Tom's station. “They've been screening meltwater pools on the berg from the sun, refreezing them before they have a chance to melt deeply enough to make cracks. Well, three nomad brollies arrived from Lomonosov Station—just left their posts of their own accord and came over and joined them. Mahmoud just reported.”

“
Very
interesting,” she said.

It was not surprising that brollies were making their own decisions. It meant that as learning intelligences, intimately connected to their environment and to one another, they had gone on to the next stage of sophistication. Her own brolly continuously monitored the biogeochemical environment, knowing when to feed the methanotroph consortia their extra nutrients, and when to stop. Her original conception of linked artificial intelligences with information feedback loops was based on biomimicry, inspired by natural systems like ecosystems and endocrine systems. Her brolly was used to working as a community of minds, so she imagined that facility could be scaled up. Each brolly could communicate with its own kind and was connected to the climate databases around the world, giving as well as receiving information, and capable of learning from it. She had a sudden vision of a multilevel, complexly interconnected grid, a sentience spanning continents and species, a kind of Gaiaweb come alive.

“How much time before they become smarter than us?” she said, half-jokingly. “This is great news, Tom.”

Afterward she watched the great curtains of the aurora paint the sky. She sat in her cabin, raising her eyes from the data scrolling down her screen. Temperature was dropping in the ocean seabed—the methane fizzler had perceptibly slowed since the project began. It was a minute accomplishment compared to the scale of the problem, but with two million pairs of eyes watching methane maps of the Arctic, maybe they could get funding to learn how to take care of the worst areas that were still manageable. Partly the methane outgassing was a natural part of a thousands-years process, but it was being exacerbated by warming seas. Didn't science ultimately teach what the world's indigenous peoples had known so well—that everything is connected? A man gets home from work in New York City and flips a switch, and a little more coal is burned, releasing more warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Or an agribusiness burns a tract of Amazon rain forest, and a huge carbon sink is gone, just like that. Or a manufacturer in the United States buys palm oil to put in cookies, and rain forests vanish in Southeast Asia to make way for more plantations. People and their lives were so tightly connected across the world that it would take a million efforts around the globe to make a difference.

She touched the orange wristlet and the screen came on. “Frigg, call Maggie.”

“Irene, Irene?” Maggie had more gray in her hair, but her voice was as loud as before. Demanding. “Where have you been? They told me at your campus you were in the Arctic, and I thought, dammit, she's come home at last, but I hear you're somewhere in Siberia?”

“Don't you keep up?” Irene said, growling, trying not to grin in delight, and failing. She blinked tears from her eyes. “Siberia is where it's at. I'm in a boat, running an experiment on the seabed. Trying to stop methane outgassing, you know, save the world, all in a day's work.”

“Great, great, but I hate coming all the way here and finding you gone. I have to tell you, I saw Lucie. Yes, you heard me right. She's going into documentary filmmaking—expedition to Nepal—”

Nepal!

“Well, I am glad she's talking to you,” Irene said, after a moment. “Is she . . . is she all right?”

“She's fine! Irene, she just needs to find her own way—you two have been by yourselves for so long . . .”

“By ourselves! In the middle of the empty streets of the Bay Area!”

“You know what I mean. Big cities can be terribly lonely. Why do you think I came back after college? Listen, Irene, nuclear families suck, and single-parent nuclear families suck even more. People need other people than just their parents. My kids have issues with being here in Iqaluit, but at least they are surrounded by uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents—”

“How are your parents? How is everyone?”

“Waiting for you to come home. Come and visit, Irene. It's been too long. We all thought you were the one who was going to stay because of everything you learned about the old ways from Grandfather.”

“The last time I came, when my father died . . . your mother threw a fish at me and told me to gut it.”