Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [199]
They moved from one set of big windows to the next, taking in the views.
“It’s like the San Joaquin Valley,” Frank said. “There are these huge irrigation rigs that roll around spraying stuff.”
Diane nodded. “I wonder if this will work.”
“Me too. If it doesn’t . . .”
“I know. It would be hard to talk people into trying anything else.”
“True.”
Around and around the bridge they walked. Everyone else was doing the same, in a circulation like that at any other party. Blue sky, blue sea, the horizon ticked by tiny wavelets, as in a pattern on wallpaper; and then the fleet, each ship haloed by a wind-tossed cloud of white mist. Frank and Diane caught each other by the shoulder to point things out, just as they would have in Optimodal. A bird; a fin in the distance.
Then another group arrived in the room, and soon they were escorted to Diane: the Secretary-General of the UN, Germany’s environmental minister, who was the head of their Green Party and a friend of Diane’s from earlier times; lastly the prime minister of Great Britain, who had done a kind of Winston Churchill during their hard winter, and who now shook Diane’s hand and said, “So this is the face that launched a thousand ships,” looking very pleased with himself. Frank couldn’t be sure Diane caught the reference; she was already smiling, and distracted by the introduction of others in the new group. They all chatted as they circled the room, and after a while Diane and Frank stood in a big circle listening to the others, their upper arms just barely touching as they stood side by side.
After another hour of this, during which nothing varied outside except a shift west in the angle of the sun, it was declared time to go; one didn’t want the helicopters to get too far from Reykjavik, and there were other visitors waiting in Iceland for their turns to visit; and the truth was, they had seen what there was to see. The ship’s crew therefore halted the Hugo Chavez’s prodigious launching of salt, and they braved the chilly blast downstairs and got back in their helo. Up it soared, higher and higher. Again the astonishing sight of a thousand tankers on the huge burnished plate spreading below them, an astonishing sight, instantly grasped as unprecedented: the first major act of planetary engineering ever attempted, and by God it looked like it.
But then the helo pilot ascended higher and higher, higher and higher, until they could see a much bigger stretch of ocean, water extending as far as the eye could see, for hundreds of miles in all directions—and all of it blank, except for their now tiny column of ships, looking like a line of toys. And then ants. In a world so vast, could anything humans do make a difference?
Diane thought so. “We should celebrate,” she said, smiling her little smile. “Do you want to go out to dinner when we get back?”
“Sure. That would be great.”
ELECTION DAY SAW WINTER RETURN TO Washington in force. It was icy everywhere, in places black ice, so that even though everything seemed to have congealed to a state of slow motion, cars still suddenly took to flight like hockey pucks, gliding majestically over the roads and looking stately until they hit something. Sirens dopplered hither and yon, defining the space of the city that was otherwise invisible in its trees. Again there were scheduled brownouts, and the wood smoke of a million fireplace fires rose with the diesel smoke of a million generators, their gray and brown strands weaving in the northwest wind.
The polls were open, however, and the voters lined up all bundled in their winter best—a best that was much better than it had been the year before. The story of the day became the story of the impact of the cold on the vote, and which party’s faithful would brave it most successfully, and which would benefit most from this clear harbinger of another long winter. The first exit polls showed a tight race, and as no one believed in exit polls anymore anyway, anything was possible. It felt like Christmas.