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By Root 1211 0

’s summit, at 14,200 feet, so the mountain served to show in a very visible form just how thick the breathable atmosphere was—and the mountain wasn’t very tall at all, in comparison to the immense reach of the plateau the highway ran over, or to the height of the sky above. It was just a snowy hill! It was sobering, Frank said; after you saw the matter that way, looking at the mountain and sensing the size of the whole planet, you were changed. Ever afterward you would be aware of an invisible ceiling low overhead containing all the breathable air under it—the atmosphere thus no more than the thinnest wisp of a skin, like cellophane wrapped ever so tightly to the lithosphere. An equally thin layer of water had liquefied in the low basins of this lithosphere, and that was the life zone: cellophane wrapping a planet, a mere faint exhalation, wisping off into space. Frank would shake his head, remembering it.

Still, it was hard to imagine.

FRANK’S HABITS WERE HIS HOME NOW, and so the trip to Khembalung and its aftermath made him feel a bit homeless all over again. What to do with the day; again this became a question he had to answer anew, hour by hour, and it could be hard.

On the other hand, all the Khembali refugees flying into Washington helped him keep things in perspective. He was homeless by choice, they were not; he had his van, his tree, his office, his club—all the rooms of his house-equivalent, scattered around town; they had nothing. Their embassy’s house in Arlington gave them temporary shelter, but everything there was in cheek-by-jowl crisis mode, and would be for a long time.

And yet they were cheerful in their manner. Frank found this impressive, though he also wondered how long it would last. Doubly exiled, first from Tibet, then from their island; now, he thought, they would join the many other refugee groups who had come to Washington to plead their case in an attempt to get back to their homes, then failed and never left, adding their children, cuisine, and holidays to the metro region’s rich mix.

Because Khembalung was wrecked. There was talk of draining the island and repairing the dike, but there was no ready source of electricity to drive the pumps, no equipment available to rebuild the dike; and though those problems could be dealt with, maybe, their fresh-water supply appeared to have been compromised as well; and the island was being thoroughly saturated by seawater; and the longer things were submerged, the worse the damage got.

Above all, Khembalung was simply too low. It had always been too low, the Sundarbans were swampy islands, seasonally wetlands; and now, with the ocean’s average level rising, the margin of safety had disappeared. No matter what they did, catastrophic floods were bound to inundate all the Sundarbans again and again. Moon tides, storm surges, even the occasional tsunamis, likely to become more frequent as methane clathrates warmed and triggered underwater landslides—all these would be flooding the coastal lowlands of the world more often.

So the immense expense and effort that would be necessary to pump out and rebuild Khembalung was not worth it. The Khembalis had other options: there were other Tibetan refugee colonies scattered around India, and the Khembalis themselves owned some land in the hills north of Calcutta. And some people at the embassy in D.C. were talking about buying land in the metro area, and settling there. Meanwhile, it could be said that all twelve thousand citizens of Khembalung had for their national territory just one old Arlington house and an office in the NSF building.

So it was a crowded house and office. Frank was always amazed to see just how crowded they were. He dropped by often to say hi, and see if there was anything he could do to help, and every time he was struck anew at how many people could be crammed into a place without breaking anything but zoning codes. Carrying boxes from delivery trucks into the kitchen, talking to Rudra in English, getting the old man to teach him some Tibetan words. Frank was always happy to see them,