TWO

I invited Tom and Shelley to my home in upstate New York. I wanted them to help me try to get my head around the problem of gas hydrates.

I gave Tom a bald summary of my private consultation with Gea. I left out the wu-wu stuff, the mixing up of past and future, Gea’s vague hints about my own cosmic destiny. I definitely said nothing about Morag.

But even this sanitized version was enough to send Tom’s antennas twitching. “One of the world’s finest artificial sentiences said this to you?”

“Why not me?” I snapped back. “Gea has to start somewhere. I do have access to some of the world’s most advanced technological capabilities, the Higgs engines. And I have you, Tom. You were right in the middle of that hydrate blow-off in Siberia. Maybe Gea is a good judge of character. Maybe she thinks that as your father I will be motivated to do something about this, to take her seriously.”

“You really think she’s capable of that kind of manipulation?”

“You didn’t meet her,” I said fervently. “Besides, you said yourself she’s one of the world’s most advanced minds. But she doesn’t have any kind of formal power in the human world. She doesn’t even get to vote. She can only get things done through people, by persuasion. If you think about it, she’s behaving exactly the way you’d expect her to.”

He looked doubtful — in fact he looked at me as if I were crazy. But in the aftermath of Siberia we had agreed, kind of, that we would try to work together on stuff, rather than use our interests and motivations as a way to pull apart from each other. So he agreed to fly over to New York, at John’s expense. But, he said mysteriously, he wanted to bring a guest of his own.

My visitors converged on my house, by plane and train and bus, for my amateur brains-trust session.

I’d been here a little over five years. The place was only an hour’s commute out of Grand Central Station, so I was hardly remote, but I was happy enough to be away from the stretched-to-the-limit overcrowding of the city itself.

My house was the modern kind, a big weatherproof concrete brute, suffused with intelligence. With solar cell arrays, a wind turbine I could unfold from the roof, and fuel cells in the basement, I was pretty much self-sufficient in electricity. There was a big chest freezer, and a cellar I kept stocked with cans and dried food. I had deep foundations and high sills and doors that sealed shut; I could have ridden out a meter-deep flood. And so on. I was no survivalist, but you had to think ahead. I’d insisted on puncturing the walls with windows, though — real windows, despite the architect’s complaints. Inside I’d faced many of the walls with wood panels. It was still a home, not a spaceship.

Tom, though, had always seemed to disapprove of the place.

He had never lived here. After Morag’s death the two of us had never really been comfortable in the old family home; it had room for the larger family Morag and I had always planned, and now it was too big for us. I took a smaller apartment in New Jersey, but it never felt like home, and was of such old building stock it became increasingly costly. When Tom started college I was happy enough to move out and take this place, a house built to modern specs.

Also I’d hoped my new place was different enough that both Tom and I would be spared any unpleasant memories. But Tom said it reminded him of my family home, my mother’s house in Florida where I’d grown up. It was “a nostalgic facsimile in concrete and gen-modified wood,” as he acutely said.

“Well, I think it’s cozy,” Shelley said to me when she arrived. “A kind of cozy bomb shelter, but cozy nonetheless.” Shelley was a pleasure, as always, a bustling knot of sanity and intelligence who brought light into my sometimes darkened life.

My greeting from Tom was more guarded. And I was surprised when Tom produced his guest: Sonia Dameyer, the American soldier who had helped him out in the first hours after his injury.

It turned out that she and Tom had formed a relationship during his recuperation. She said, “I know it’s a little sad for the only two Americans in a foreign country to glom onto each other. But there you go. I had some furlough due, and a free plane ticket from Uncle Sam. So when Tom said you’d invited him over here, I couldn’t resist. I thought it would be good to meet you in person, Mr. Poole. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Michael. Why should I mind?”

She was in civilian clothes, a neat, attractive jumpsuit. But she was one of those soldier types who always looked military, even out of uniform; her posture was upright, her manner correct, her intelligence obvious, her attention focused. I hadn’t seen any hint of her relationship with Tom when I’d met her during my VR jaunt to Siberia — though maybe I should have. I liked her, as I had immediately in Siberia, but I found her a bit formidable.

We gathered on the living room sofas with mugs of coffee, heaps of cookies, flipcharts, scratch pads and softscreens, and got down to business.

“So,” said Tom. “The world is going to flip its icy lid. What are we supposed to do about it?” He meant to be ironic; he just sounded out of his depth.

To my surprise Sonia leaned forward. “Can I make a methodological suggestion?…” She began to outline an approach to problem-solving she said she’d used many times before. “We’ll break the day into two halves. It’s eleven A.M now. We’ll work until lunch — one, say, or one-thirty. And we’ll use that time to open up the problem. We’ll just throw in everything we know, and anything else we come up with — any suggestion or idea, however tentative.”

Tom said dryly, “And are we allowed to laugh at other people’s dumb suggestions?”

“The whole point is to develop ideas. But there are two rules. One is that everything gets recorded. And the second is, before lunch anyhow, that if you do comment you do it in a positive way. You have to start by saying what you like about the idea. We’re trying to find ideas and build on them, not destroy them. After lunch we’ll pull it all together more coherently and critically.” Tom laughed, but Sonia said firmly, “Those are the rules.”

Shelley grinned. “Fine by me.”

I was impressed. For sure, if I had suggested this, Tom would have shot it down in flames at the get-go. I imagined Sonia working like this out in the field, pulling together her own motivated, trained-up,

overbright staff with a few unhappy or angry locals, to fix whatever was broken. Now she was using those same management skills to handle our awkward father-son dynamic.

Shelley leaned to me and whispered, “I think we’re going to be glad she’s here.”

So we began pool what we knew about gas hydrates.

Tom had his personal experience, and what he’d picked up on the ground in Siberia. I had what I’d learned from Gea, and in follow-up studies since. Sonia for now acted mostly as a recording angel.

The most interesting new facts came from Shelley, who, typically, had been doing some burrowing. She’d found that the end-Permian extinction, through which Gea had walked me so painfully, wasn’t the only instance in which gas hydrate releases had made a mess of Earth’s climate. She displayed graphs of temperature and atmospheric composition. “This spike is known as the ‘initial Eocene thermal maximum.’ It happened about fifty-five million years ago, ten million years after the dinosaurs died off.”

There had been a sharp increase of global temperatures, a hike of five or ten degrees in a “geological instant” — a time so short it couldn’t be distinguished in the rock record, perhaps as fast as decades, maybe even just a few years. And at the same time there had been a big pulse of carbon dioxide injected into the air. It had been a major gas-hydrate release, just like the end-Permian event.