But even dead landscapes had changed. You could see how the faces of the rocks had been fenced off and wired over. Rising temperatures were destabilizing high-altitude rock faces by thawing the deep permafrost beneath them. Climbers were another endangered species nowadays.

I had got lost in thought. Both the children were looking at me, calm concern marking their perfectly smooth faces. They looked as if they had been coached to sit like that.

I got out of the room.

I rattled around the house. Maybe I could call a water cab and go into town for a while. Find a bar, preferably nonfloating. Or maybe just walk the shore. But I didn’t want to stray too far from John and his calls. Even then, even at such a dreadful time in my life, I was in his power, and my mother’s. I was in a kind of prison, I thought, trapped into immobility by all the unspoken rules and treaties that had been laid down in my fifty-two years of life with my family.

Defeated, I trailed back upstairs to John’s room.

He was sitting on his bed, glancing at headlines on a softscreen. “No news.”

“You’ve checked with your office?”

“No need. Feliz is a good guy; he will keep trying until he gets through, and he will call the minute he does. Take it easy. Do you want something? A drink — I brought some beer.”

“No. Thanks.”

Hands in pockets, I mooched around the room. There seemed to be even less of John in here than there had been of me in my room, although John would have systematically stripped the place of anything valuable long ago. But in one shadowed corner I found a small bookcase. “Hey. Here are my old science fiction novels.”

“Really?” He came across to see. We bent down side by side, brothers, two thick-necked middle-aged men, straining to see the titles on cracked and yellowing spines.

I said, “I imagined they had been thrown out. I guess Mother moved them in here in one of her clear-outs.” Which would have been typical of her, I thought sourly; this stuff had been unbelievably important to me as a kid, but she didn’t even know whether it had belonged to me or John.

John ran his fingers over the titles. Some of these books went back to the 1960s or even earlier. They had mostly been gifts from uncle George, who had collected books that had been old when he was a kid. “These might be worth something.”

“They were mine, you know,” I said, too hastily.

He held his hands up, a faintly mocking smile on his face. “I don’t dispute it.” He pulled a couple of copies off the shelves, took them out of their protective Mylar bags, and leafed through them. “Not in great condition,” he said. “See how this is yellowed — too long in the sun.”

I straightened up. “Yeah. But I wouldn’t want to sell them. And anyhow the collectors’ market for this stuff isn’t what it was.”

“It isn’t?”

“Too far in the past. We’re all too old. For every collectible there is a demographic. You’re at your peak as a collector at thirty, forty — old enough to be nostalgic, rich enough to have disposable income, young enough to be foolish about spending it. But science fiction is older than that, long over.”

“It was over even when we were kids,” he said. “I never understood what you saw in the stuff.”

“I know you didn’t,” I said testily. “Which is the difference between us.” I glanced along the shelf and pulled out a novel. “Nobody reads the literature, but there’s still a scholarly tradition around it. And there’s a fascination to it, you know, John. All those lost futures.” When I was a kid the future was still a bright, welcoming place, a place I wanted to live. We might all have been kidding ourselves even then — the Die-back was already under way — but that was how it felt to me. Now, if you thought about the future at all it was as a black place that would erase you, like a hospital, a place you went to die. I put the frail old book back on the shelf. “It’s an anti-progressive viewpoint, almost medieval. We’re regressing, philosophically.”

“But this stuff — fantastic dreams of rocket ships and aliens — it always repelled me. It never seemed real.”

“But the future is real,” I said. “To ignore it is absurd. It’s as if we decided we don’t believe in Mount Everest, or the Pacific Ocean. They are still there, whether we close our eyes to them or not. The future is coming whether we like it or not. The world is changing, and so are we. The future must be different from the past.”

“But nobody cares anymore,” John said brutally. “And what bothers you is that the future turns out not to have a place for people like you. Engineers. People who want to build things. People who want to fly in space! Well, we’re too busy fixing what we broke before to build anything new.”

He was right. The space program had been a big disappointment to me, all my life. Nearly eighty years after Neil Armstrong, still nobody had been to Mars, nobody had left Earth’s orbit since the Moonwalkers. We hadn’t even sent a probe out to the Kuiper Anomaly. The Warming had absorbed all our energies, and the great shock of the Happy Anniversary flash-bombing in 2033 had jolted us even more.

I think John probably knew that I was, in fact, working on a design study for a new generation of spacecraft. But the work paid peanuts, and would most probably never fly — it was a hobby, a paper model as I had once made models of the Space Station of plastic and paint and decals. Maybe that proved his point. We were all too busy fixing things, coping with one set of destructive changes after another, spending all our civilization’s resources just to maintain stasis, to dream of interplanetary adventure.

John sat on his bed and leaned against the wall, his big football player’s hands locked behind his head. “You know, if you were to write a science fiction novel now, I’d be the hero.”

That was outrageous enough to make me laugh. “How so?”

“Because I’m dealing with the future as it exists. And I’m helping people.”

Basically he dealt with compensation for environmental impacts. He had started out representing individuals, people who lost their homes or their health through avoidable toxic spills and the like. He had moved on to advise legislators on adjustments to the tax system on such things as polluting fuels, heat sources, or greenhouse-emission processes.

It was all about a striving for balance, John said; you had to balance the drive for economic development with a need for environmental stability, you had to balance economic efficiency with equity for those impacted. He had even worked on the notion of “intergenerational equity,” in which, rather than ignoring future generations altogether or at best using them as garbage handlers for your waste, you actually paid a “future tax” for any impact you might have on them. John had made something of a name for himself; indeed to my chagrin, he’d appeared on TV a few times as a talking head on the issues.

His first love, though, had always been adversarial law, and in his fifties he had been drawn back to it — but to much larger cases. “Rather than defending the little old lady against the company who is poisoning her drinking water, I’m now, for instance, advising the administration on a massive suit against China.” While the United States had become a leader in global environmental management in the 2020s, China, in a relentless drive for economic growth, had continued to pollute, even to the present day. And then there are redistribution charges…” It was a rule of thumb of the Warming that hot areas lost out while cooler areas won. So, for instance, an Iowa farmer afflicted by increasing aridity lost, while a Minnesota farmer with a longer growing season won.

“Simple equity is the philosophical guide,” John said. “The guy in Minnesota uses his bounty to subsidize his colleague in Iowa. And if things change around in the future, the flow of funds can always go the other way. People accept this, I think; it’s all manifestly fair.” He even said you could extend this on a planetary scale — not through lawsuits, like the United States vs. China, but through “planetary bargaining.” Canada, a winner, could bail out India, a loser, and so on.