Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [197]
Frank sat in a room at NSF with Kenzo and Edgardo, looking at data in from NOAA. He had some ideas about sea-level-rise mitigation, in fact. But now the topic of the hour switched back to the International North Atlantic Current Mitigation Project. Data coming back from the RUVs, white whales, ships, and buoys scattered throughout the Atlantic were encouraging. It was becoming apparent, Kenzo said, that the predictions made by some that a stall in the thermohaline circulation would create negative feedbacks to its continuance had been correct. With the heat of the Gulf Stream not reaching the far North Atlantic, there had been a resulting southward movement of the Hadley circulation in the atmosphere; this meant a southerly shift in the Atlantic’s intertropical convergence zone. Normally the convergence zone was a high precipitation zone, and so with its shift south the rain had diminished in the midlatitudes where it used to fall, so that the salinity of the balked mass at the north end of the stall had been rising. Even the fresh-water cap north of Iceland was not as fresh as it had been back in the spring.
So conditions were ripe; everything was shaping up well for their intervention. The fleet of single-hulled VLCC tankers had been loaded at the many salt pans and ports around the Caribbean and North Africa that had been called upon, and they were almost all at the rendezvous point. The fleet headed north moving into formation, and the photos coming in over the internet were hard to believe, the sheer number of ships making it look like a sure artifact of Photoshopping.
Then the dispersal of the salt began, and the photos got even stranger. It was scheduled to last two weeks, the last of October and the first of November; and halfway through it, three days before the presidential election, Frank got a call from Diane.
“Hey, do you want to go out and see the salting in person?”
“You bet I do!”
“There’s an empty seat you can have, but you’ll have to get ready fast.”
“I’m ready now.”
“Good for you. Meet me at Dulles at nine.”
Ooooop! A voyage to the high North Atlantic, to see the salt fleet with Diane!
Their trip to Manhattan came to mind; and since then of course he and Diane had spent a million hours together, both at work and in the gym. So when they sat down that night in adjoining seats on Icelandic Air’s plane, and Diane put her head on his shoulder and fell asleep even before it took off, it felt very natural, like part of the rest of their interaction.
They came down on Reykjavik just before dawn. The surface of the sea lay around the black bulk of Iceland like a vast sheet of silver. By then Diane was awake; back in D.C. this was her usual waking hour, unearthly though that seemed to Frank, who had just gotten tired enough to lean his head on hers. These little intimacies were shaken off when the seatbacks returned to their upright position. Diane leaned across Frank to look out the window, Frank leaned back to let her see. Then they were landing, and out of the plane into the airport. Neither of them had checked luggage, and they weren’t there long before it was time to join a group of passengers trammed out to a big helicopter. On board, earplugs in, they rose slowly and then chuntered north over empty blue ocean.
The northern horizon grew hazy, and soon after that those passengers with a view were able to distinguish the tankers themselves, long and narrow, like Mississippi river barges in their proportions, but immensely bigger. The fleet was moving in a rough convoy formation, and as they flew north and slowly descended, there came a moment when the tankers dotted the ocean’s surface for as far as they could see in all directions, spread out like iron filings in a magnetic field, all pointing north. Lower still: black syringes, lined in rows on a blue table, ready to give their “long injections