A lot of work came John’s way through the various Stewardship agencies. The whole notion of the Stewardship was based on taking responsibility for your actions, on accepting the true cost of what you did, or sharing any benefit. But of course you’d always put “winning” and “losing” in quotes; really it was all simply change, which hit everybody to varying degrees.

But all this equity and balancing and taxing and fairness was just a way of sharing out the impact of the Warming, I thought, not of reducing that impact in the first place. It occurred to me there was a narrow assumption hidden here, that things would carry on much the same as they had for a while — falling apart, maybe, but doing so slowly, staying more or less bearable, manageable. But what if not?…

John started to tell me about a book he was working on.

“Back up,” I said. “A book?”

He grinned smugly. “It’s all about the future of money.”

He was developing an idea that dated back to John Maynard Keynes, an economist who worked in the middle of the twentieth century. “You’d run international trade in a whole new currency which would earn negative interest. So you would naturally spend your diminishing wealth as quickly as possible, which will boost trade and the exports of other nations. It’s a new paradigm,” he said. “A way to avoid the debt mountains of the past, and to boost the global trade on which we rely. Why not? Money is just a mental construct. We can make up its rules any way we want. I have some contacts in the Administration through the China case, and I think I can garner some support…”

And so on. I listened to all this with a sickening feeling. Whereas I, the engineer, was a nineteenth-century relic, a sad Jules Verne character, perhaps my smart-ass brother really was an archetype of our times, a modern hero. “So you’re going to become more prominent than ever,” I said. “I’ll never be able to get away from your face.”

He laughed. There was a grain of sincere bitterness in my harangue; of course he detected it. “I’ll invite you to the launch of the book,” he said.

I managed to sleep that night, but only a little. I got up early and left the house.

I went down to the coast, and walked and walked. I wasn’t going anywhere; I was just trying to escape the contents of my own head, as my airline therapist had so wisely suggested.

Everywhere the angry sea had risen. The water had washed away fences, waves had lapped over lawns, and palm trees sagged over the water, undercut, surely doomed. One guy had built a chicken shack right at the edge of his land, not meters from the sea. When the wind blew the chickens must have got soaked, terrified; I wondered what kind of eggs he got out of them.

It was all depressingly predictable. Florida was always flat and soggy. Human efforts over centuries had pushed the water out of there, and reclaimed much of the land. But now the ocean was coming back. Even the Florida aquifer was contaminated with salt, as well as with industrial spill-off. It wasn’t good news for the flora and fauna, either. The salt water that now pushed inland with every tide had played havoc with freshwater ecologies. The Everglades weren’t a place the tourists went to nowadays; the rotting vegetable matter that clogged the dead swamps stunk to high heaven. It was said the crocs still survived though, living off the rotting detritus around them, surviving this extinction event as they had survived so many others.

The wind changed, to blow off the sea. That ocean breeze smelled foul, a choking smell like rubber burning somewhere. It was a cocktail of toxins that might have blown all the way from the sprawling industrial wastelands of central Europe and Africa or even Asia: some of that crud got very high up, and could even circle the Earth.

I wondered how I would feel about all this if I were Happified, like John’s kids. I had once discussed this with John, the only time I dared, the only time I was drunk enough, with his wife out of the way.

“The pursuit of happiness is our inalienable right, Michael,” he had said. “It says so in the Constitution, remember. Every parent wants their child to be happy, above all. You try to care for them, you give them education, money, to maximize their opportunities to get on in life — but in the end happiness is the final goal. That’s an argument that goes back to Aristotle, actually; he argued that every other good is a means to an end, but happiness is the end.”

“Smart guy.”

“And now we know that at least fifty percent of the likelihood of your happiness is inherited, even without modification. But we can modify. We’re the first generation that can guarantee their kids happiness.”

So you plied your kids with drugs and therapy. Or you spliced their genomes, as John had, to make them happy come what may.

I thought I saw something slithering through scrubby dune grass. It might have been a tree snake, which had come into Florida and other parts of the continental United States from Guam, via Hawaii. Poisonous as hell, and a vicious predator of birds. On the other hand, tree-snake meat recipes were spicing up the menus in Miami restaurants.

They could grow three meters long. Looking at it sliding through the grass made me shudder. I turned back, heading for home.

By the time I got back to the house it was around eight in the morning.

My mother was already out, working on a row of potted plants at the top of the yard, in the lee of the house. She was on her knees on a railed pad, an old lady’s gardening aid. But her bare fingers were crusted with dirt, and she dug away with a vengeance.

I remembered how she had always loved her garden. When we were kids I used to think she loved it more than us. Now, watching her, I wasn’t so sure we had been wrong.

She glanced up irritably as my shadow fell over her. “You missed your breakfast,” she said.

“I wasn’t hungry.”

“I’ll fix you something.” She sniffed. “Better yet, do it yourself.”

“Really, I’m fine.”

“There’s no news. About Tom, I mean.”

“I know.”

“I’m sure everything will be fine. You’d have heard by now if not.”

“You’re probably right.” I sat down beside her on the wooden floor of the porch. She had a jug of lemonade beside her; I accepted a glass.

“I don’t suppose you want to help me with this,” she said.

“Not especially.”

“Where did you walk to?”

“Nowhere particular.”

“Oh, you’re always so vague, Michael, you’re maddening.”

“Mom, the breeze off the sea—”

“I know. The air used to be so clean here. One reason I always loved it. Now it’s like Manchester.”

“Yeah.” I watched her doggedly digging away at the roots of her plants. “It can’t be good for you.”

“My lungs are made of leather. Don’t trouble yourself.”

“They’re evacuating Miami Beach, aren’t they?”

She snorted. “No, they aren’t. Nobody uses that word. There is a program of transfer. Of migration, if you want to put it like that. Evacuation is what refugees do,” she said sternly. “It’s not as if we’ll be underwater tomorrow.”

I knew how painful this was. Since the automobile had vanished from America, this had become an age when you stayed home rather than traveled, an age of villages, of local stuff. And for a close community to be broken up was difficult.

“We have a program of agreements with other population centers,” she said. “In Minnesota, for instance. John has helped negotiate the settlements.” I hadn’t known that. “Seventy-five here, a hundred there. Always family groups, of course.” It had to be planned, she said. You couldn’t let the community left behind just fall into decay. So there were incentive schemes to keep teachers, doctors, civil servants working here, even though there was no long-term career for them. “It’s a long-term program. A cultural achievement, in its way.”