That being the case, and since Geneva already hosted the headquarters of the World Health Organization and several other UN agencies, when the Paris Agreement established this new agency of theirs, Zurich forcefully made the case that Geneva was already too crowded with agencies, and expensive as a result, and after some vigorous inter-cantonal tussling, they won the bid to host the new agency. Offering rent-free the compound on Hochstrasse, and several nearby ETH buildings as well, was no doubt one of many reasons their bid succeeded.
Now the head of the ministry— Mary Murphy, an Irish woman of about forty-five years of age, ex–minister of foreign affairs in the government of the Irish Republic, and before that a union lawyer— walked into her office to find a crisis that didn’t surprise her one bit. Everyone had been transfixed with horror at the news of the deadly heat wave in India; there were sure to be immediate ramifications. Now the first of these had come.
Her chief of staff, a short slight man named Badim Bahadur, followed Mary into her office saying, “You must have heard that the Indian government is beginning a solar radiation management action.”
“Yes, I just saw it this morning,” she said. “Have they given us the details of their plan?”
“They came half an hour ago. Our geoengineering people are saying that if they do it as planned, it will equate to about the same as the Pinatubo volcanic eruption of 1991. That lowered global temperature by about a degree Fahrenheit, for a year or two. That was from the sulfur dioxide in the ash cloud that the volcano shot into the stratosphere. It will take the Indians several months to replicate that boost of sulfur dioxide, our people say.”
“Do they have the capacity to do it?”
“Their air force can probably do it, yes. They can certainly try, they’ve got the necessary aircraft and equipment. A lot of it will simply reconfigure aerial refueling technology. And planes dump fuel all the time, so that part won’t be so hard. The main problem will be getting up as high as possible, and then it’s just a matter of quantity, the number of missions needed. Thousands of flights, for sure.”
Mary pulled her phone from her pocket, tapped the screen for Chandra. Head of India’s delegation to the Paris Agreement, she was well known to Mary. It would be late in Delhi, but this was when they usually talked.
When she answered, Mary said, “Chandra, it’s Mary, can you talk for a minute?”
“For a minute, yes,” Chandra said. “It’s very busy here.”
“I’m sure. What’s this about your air force doing a Pinatubo?”
“Or a double Pinatubo, yes. This is what our academy of sciences is recommending, and the prime minister has ordered it.”
“But the Agreement,” Mary said, sitting down on her chair and focusing on her colleague’s voice. “You know what it says. No atmospheric interventions without consultation and agreement.”
“We are breaking the Agreement,” Chandra said flatly.
“But no one knows what the effects will be!”
“They will be like Pinatubo, or hopefully double that. Which is what we need.”
“You can’t be sure that there won’t be other effects—”
“Mary!” Chandra exclaimed. “Stop it right now. I know what you are going to say even before you say it. Here’s what we are sure of in India: millions of people have just died. We’ll never even know how many died, there are too many to count. It could be twenty million people. Do you understand what that means?”
“Yes.”
“No. You don’t understand. I invite you to come see it in person. Really you should, just so you know.”
Mary found herself short of breath. She swallowed. “I will if you want me to.”
A long silence followed. Finally Chandra spoke, her voice tight and choked. “Thank you for that, but maybe there is too much trouble here now for us to handle such a visit. You can see in the reports. I will send you some we are making. What you need to know now is that we are scared here, and angry too. It was Europe and America and China who caused this heat wave, not us. I know we have burned a lot of coal in the last few decades, but it’s nothing compared to the West. And yet we signed the Agreement to do our part. Which we have done. But no one else is fulfilling commitments, no one is paying the developing nations, and now we have this heat wave. And another one could happen next week! Conditions are much the same!”
“I know.”
“Yes, you know. Everyone knows, but no one acts. So we are taking matters into our own hands. We’ll lower global temperatures for a few years, everyone will benefit. And perhaps we’ll dodge another massacre like this one.”
“All right.”
“We do not need your permission!” Chandra shouted.
“I didn’t mean that,” Mary said. But the line had gone dead.
5
We drove in with a fuel truck, water truck, all that. It was like going out into nothing. With the electricity out, pumps weren’t working, nothing was working. We set to work on the power plants before we did anything about all the dead. In any case there was nothing we could do about them, the bodies were sleeping where they fell. This wasn’t just the people, but all the cattle too. Seeing all the bodies, cows, people, dogs, someone said something about the way Tibetans bury their dead, called sky burial— let the vultures eat the bodies. And there were some vultures doing that, yes. Clouds of vultures and crows. They must have flown in afterward. Sometimes the stink was horrible, but then we would move on or the wind would shift, and it went away. It seemed like it was too hot for smells, the air was cooked. The main smell was of burning. And things were burning, yes. Once the power came back on, there were some downed lines east of Lucknow, and brush fires started from them. Next day a wind came and the fire spread and got into the towns and we had to fight the fire before anything else. We got particulate readings of 1500 ppm.
There was a lake we could pump from, next to one town near Lucknow. The lake was filled with dead bodies, it was awful, but we threw the pump intake out into the lake anyway, because we needed the water. We were downwind of a brush fire, it was coming at us fast. So when the pump started filling our water trucks we were relieved.
Then I heard a noise, at first I thought it was something in the pump line, a kind of squeak it was. But then it seemed to be coming from the lakeshore, where there was a sidewalk running around the edge of the water. So I went over to look. I don’t know. I guess it sounded alive.
He was lying against a building across the sidewalk from the lake. He had a shirt draped over his head. I saw him move and shouted to the others and went to him. He was a firangi, with brown hair and skin that was all peeling off. He looked like he had been burned, or boiled, I don’t know— he looked dead but he was moving. His eyes were almost swollen shut, but I could see he was looking at me. Once we started helping him he never said a thing, never made another sound. His lips were cracked bloody. I thought maybe his voice was gone, that he was too cooked to talk. We gave him water by the spoonful. We were afraid to give him too much at once. Once we got the word to team command, the medicos were with us pretty quickly. They took over and gave him infusions. He watched them do it. He looked around at us, and back at the lake, but he never said a thing. His eyes were just slits, and so red. He looked completely mad. Like a different kind of being entirely.