Tatiana had waved this off when Mary once mentioned the thought over drinks. “No you are perfect! Nice Irish girl, everyone loves you! I would wreck everything at once, bashing around like a KGB thug. Which I am,” she added with a dangerous glint in her eye.
“Not really,” Mary said.
“No, not really. But I would wreck things. We need you at the top, getting us in the door. It’s similar to legal standing, really. Less formal but just as important. You have to get people to listen to you before you can make your case. That’s what you do— people listen to you. Then we can go to work.”
“I hope so. Do you really think we can get significant legal standing for people who don’t exist yet?”
“I’m not sure. On the one hand, the circle of inclusion has been growing over historical time, which is a kind of precedent. More kinds of people given standing, even ecologies given standing, as in Ecuador. It sets a pattern, and logically it holds water. But even if we succeed in that part, we have a second problem, maybe bigger, in the weakness of international courts generally.”
“Do you think they’re weak?”
Tatiana gave Mary a sharp look, as if to say Please be serious. “Nations agree to them only if they like their judgments. But judgments always side with one side or other, so the losing side is never pleased. And there is no sheriff for the world. So, the US does what it wants, and the rest of us also do what we want. The courts only work when some petty war criminal gets caught and everyone decides to look virtuous.”
Mary nodded unhappily. The Indians’ flouting of the Paris Agreement with their geoengineering, not much different legally than the general disregard for the Agreement’s emission reduction targets, was just the latest example of this kind of behavior. “So what do you think we can do to improve that situation?”
Tatiana shrugged. “Rule of law is all we’ve got,” she said darkly. “We tell people that and then try to make them believe it.”
“How do we do that?”
“If the world blows up they’ll believe it. That’s why we got the international order we got after World War Two.”
“Not good enough?” Mary suggested.
“No, but nothing is ever good enough. We just make do.” Tatiana brightened, although Mary saw the sly look that indicated a joke: “We make a new religion! Some kind of Earth religion, everyone family, universal brotherhood.”
“Universal sisterhood,” Mary said. “An Earth mother religion.”
“Exactly,” Tatiana said, and laughed. “As it should be, right?”
They toasted the idea. “Write up the laws for that,” Mary said. “Have them ready for when the time comes.”
“Of course,” Tatiana said. “I have entire constitution already, in here.” And she tapped her forehead.
10
We took off from Bihta and Darbhanga and INS Garuda and Gandhinagar, mostly in Ilyushin IL-78s, bought long ago from the Soviet Union. We had some Boeing and Airbus refuelers too. They were old planes, and it was very cold inside them. Our suits were old too, they were hard to move in, and hardly anything as insulation. We got very cold up there, but the flights were relatively short.
We flew to sixty thousand feet, as high as the planes could get. Higher would have been better but we couldn’t do it. It took a couple of hours, as we always carried a maximum load. Two planes got caught in the so-called coffin corner and stalled catastrophically, and one of the crews didn’t get out.
Once up there we deployed the fuel lines and pumped the aerosols into the air. The plumes looked like dumped fuel at first, but they were really aerosol particulates, we were told mostly sulfur dioxide and then some other chemicals, like from a volcano, but there wasn’t ash like in a volcanic explosion, it was a mix made to stay up there and reflect sunlight. Manufactured at Bhopal and elsewhere in India.
We flew most of our missions over the Arabian Sea, so the prevailing winds of late summer would carry the stuff over India before anywhere else. We wanted that, it was for us we were doing it, and some felt we might also avoid some criticism by doing it that way. But soon enough what we released would get carried by the winds all over the stratosphere, mostly in the northern hemisphere but eventually everywhere. There it would be deflecting some sunlight.
Even in India you could hardly see any difference in the sky. For all our lives we were living under the ABC, the Asian Brown Cloud, so we were used to dusty skies. Our operation only made things a little whiter by day, and the sunsets were sometimes more red than before. Quite beautiful on certain days. But mostly things looked the same. The sunlight we deflected to space was said to be about a fifth of one percent of the total incoming. Very important crucial stuff, but it’s not really possible to see a difference that small.
Global effect was said to be like Pinatubo’s eruption in 1991, or some said a double Pinatubo. The total release was taken to the stratosphere in several thousand individual missions. We had a fleet of only two hundred planes, so we each went up scores and scores of times, spread out over seven months. That was a lot of work. Of course it was a pretty small effort as these things go. And if it helped to prevent another heat wave, it was worth doing.
We knew the Chinese hated the idea, and Pakistan of course, and although we flew only when the jet streams were running toward the east or northeast, there were times when those countries lay in the path of dispersion. And all over the world people pointed out that the ozone layer would get hurt, which would be bad for everyone. Once a heat-seeking missile flew right by our plane, Vikram dodged it at the last minute, the plane squealed like a cat. No one ever found out who shot it at us. But we didn’t care. We did what we were told, we were happy to do it. Everyone had lost someone they knew in the heat wave. Even if they hadn’t, it was India. And it could happen again, anywhere in India and really anywhere in the world. As our officials told people, over and over. Even farther north a heat wave could strike. Europe once suffered one that killed seventy thousand people, even though Europe is so far north. Well more than half the land on Earth is at risk. So we did it.
Day after day for seven months. And round-the-clock, what with maintenance and refueling, and the filling of the tanks. It was a routine that took many thousands of people working together. We got tired, exhausted, but also we got into the rhythm of it. There were enough crews to fly once out of every three missions per plane. For many weeks in the middle of it, it felt like it would go on forever. That it was all we were ever meant to do. We felt like we were saving India, and maybe saving the world. But it was India we were concerned with. No more deadly heat waves. So we hoped. It was a very emotional time.
Now, if I go anywhere in the world, and if someone speaks against what we did, I challenge them. You don’t know anything, I tell them. It wasn’t your people, so you don’t care. But we know and we care. And there hasn’t been a heat wave like that since. One may come again, no doubt of that, but we did what we could. We did the right thing. I must admit, I sometimes shout at people if they deny that. I damn them to hell. Which is a place we in India have already seen. So I have no patience for people who object to what we did. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t seen it, and we have.