Book 1. The Flood
The year is 2067. The sea level has risen six feet, and its rise is accelerating. Catastrophic weather events, and the drownings of whole cities, are already taking place. Can Anneliese rescue her favorite painting in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum before the flood arrives? Can Noah Blazo sell his plan to save the world?
It makes no sense at first: a band of heroes,
Led by an old man with a bolo tie,
Who saved a world that was not worth the saving.
There’s nothing for it then but to explain.
Perhaps for most of you it’s history,
But there’s a right way and a wrong way
To tell a story, and this one is epic.
That, though, is rather easier said than done,
For I, who sneer at everything, am quite
Unfit to tell an epic tale like this one.
Unfit in all but this: I know the form.
An invocation often seems to work,
At least it puts the blame on someone else.
Come then, creative spirit, whom we murdered
Almost the moment you were incarnated.
Come animate my corpse as I do yours.
I do you wrong, I know, to speak this way.
Call it a habit picked up from my times,
Or maybe disappointed idealism,
The poor potential-convert’s sharp suspicion.
What conversation I have had with you
Has always been so sweet, so rational,
So mellow with good humor that I wonder
Why I should take this unkind tone with you.
Perhaps I’m seeking a rebuff, to be
Excused, let off from this enormous task;
Don’t argue with a burning bush, they say,
But sometimes that way you can get a bargain.
Or maybe I’m too shy for this encounter,
Trying to put on an uncaring front,
Dealing with failure now before it happens.
Answer me this, though: If I’m just your pen
—Granted, indeed, a quite unworthy one,
But beggars can’t be choosers in these times—
And if a Voice would tell a poet what
To say, must not that voice too be inspired?
If you’re my guide, then who’s inspiring you?
Or are you some back-channel of my brain?
Is brain a robot with a muse in charge?
If what is in my brain must be perceived
By a homunculus within it, why
Should not that gnome-observer need its own?
Or—here I think I start to see my way—
Perhaps it’s just this infinite regress
In its unfathomable depth of weaving
That is the shimmery spirit that inspires.
Turtles, they say in scorn, all the way down;
But just suppose the one right at the bottom
Stands, twisted, on the one that’s on the top?—
And it’s that Moebius ring that rings and chimes
With all the melody of consciousness?
Maybe that burning bush is not consumed.
So, friend, with your huge generosity,
Open me now to sing the old, old story.
♦
One of Noah Blazo’s friends—you’ve heard of her—
Was Dr. Anneliese Grotius,
Who framed the Iball Makers’ Bill of Rights,
Whereby the maze of intellectual property
Was solved by data-mining in the web,
Untangled by a 3-D point of view.
She turned the problem upside down, as usual,
And blockchained1 from the user to the source,
Made information a utility
Fair-valued by the user’s use of it,
Paying surprised creators their reward.
The point of this is showing what she was
(Like many of the giants we’ll be meeting):
A polymath whose curiosity
Unlimited by modesty or pride
Carried ideas over from one field,
Like spores, into another somewhere else.
Because, you might not know, her actual job
Was as curator of renaissance art
In Amsterdam’s once-famous Rijksmuseum.
Picture the night of the Great North Sea Storm
Thirty-one years ago. Annie’s umbrella
Has blown out with the wind, she’s had to tame it;
She’s walking up the Hooftstraat, going west
Into a troubled sunset under clouds,
The sun through drizzle shining off the street.
The evenings come too early with the time-change;
The plane-trees by the Singelgracht canal
Are almost stripped now of their yellow leaves.
She’s worried by the weather on her phone,
It’s looking like an arctic hurricane,
More and more frequent now in fall and winter,
And she’s decided to go back to work
—Though the museum closed its doors at five—
To keep an eye on her much-loved collection.
She’s got some takeout from the Sama-Sebo2—
Some congee, gado-gado, cakalang—
She’ll watch the latest on her office laptop,
Maybe call maintenance if things get rough.
Annie is beautiful, a Vermeer girl,
Her cheeks bright pink now in the windy evening,
Her flying raincoat wrapped about her body,
Turning to shield her phone as she calls home,
Her voice raised with a throaty Flemish catch.
Her office looks out to the north and west
Over the steep-pitched rooftops of the city.
She puts her dinner in the microwave
And turns the newsfeed on. It is not good.
The gale has now become a hurricane,
Fed by the warmer water of the Drift.
Turning past Scotland, it is pushing down
Through Viking, Forties, Cromarty and Forth
Toward the funnel of the German Bight;
The fens of Cambridge now are under water,
Ely Cathedral once more is an island;
The Norfolk broads have been evacuated,
The London barrier has raised its bastions;
Above the sunken sun, a thin new moon.
Spring tide, storm surge, and seven feet more water,
Swollen with heat and with the melting bergs
Calved from the West Antarctic ice collapse:
When will the thing make landfall? When, and where?
She kills the sound, watches the images,
The fleecy spiral from the satellite,
Texel and Vlieland almost overwhelmed,
Twenty-five feet of storm-surge now, and rising.
She trusts the genius of Dutch engineering,
The great fallback along the western coast,
The vast earthworks across the Zuider Zee.
She’s listening to Simeon ten Holt,
The Ostinato, four pianos, in
Some kind of nervous trance or unmarked dream.
But there’s a newsflash, and she zeroes in:
The Afsluitdijk is breached and swept away;
A boiling wave, forty feet high, is racing
Across the IJsselmeer toward the city;
This shell of streets, concentric, intricate,
Its four rings of canals, its thousand bridges,
Its noble and ornate façades, its history,
Birthplace of European democracy,
Stands fragile, suddenly, before mere chaos.
The wind outside is battering the walls:
Annie calls maintenance, security.
They’re doing all they can to seal the doors,
Shutter the windows on the lower level.
The skylight of the atrium now shatters,
And rain drifts down upon the café tables.
Perhaps the Houtribdijk will hold; huge trucks
And earthmovers have been at work all day.
She gets a call from the director; he
Is trying to get his family to high ground.
It’s cut dead as the server link is lost.
Before the newsfeed goes off air, she learns
That yes, the Houtribdijk is down, and now
The huge wave, roiling with mud and sand
And trees and houses and container ships
Like toys, an avalanche of white Maersk trailers
And tumbled heaps of new imported cars,
Is thundering across the Markermeer.
The power’s off; red safety lights come on;
She runs downstairs, and finds beside the door
The chief of maintenance, Jan Vanderpost.
He can’t believe what’s happening—he thinks
He can defend the lower floors. She says:
“Leave it. Get everyone upstairs, and bring
All of the Flemish works that you can carry.”
He takes no notice, shoring up the doors.
Security stands by him; in despair
She hurries up into the gallery
And sprints for the great canvas at the end.
The wind has risen to a scream, but underneath
She hears a rumble far more terrible,
Almost too deep for sound, but shattering,
As if the eardrums had been blasted in.
Somehow she’d picked up an X-Acto knife,
And now the Night Watch3 lies before her, naked,
The gallant citizens before their city;
Weeping she cuts it from the frame, rolls up
This massive carpet, hard enough to drag,
Let alone carry. She gets one end up though,
And hauls it up the stairs, among the moderns.
Exhausted, she collapses; one more floor,
One final effort, and she’s at her office.
Then in the quick tail of her eye she sees
In evening’s last strange light a monstrous sea
Of darkness sweeping in; a sudden blow,
The northern wing collapses; she is deaf,
Falls to the shaking floor. The painting shifts,
Unrolls a little, and she sees the drummer,
The one who didn’t pay to be in it,
Beating away as darkness closes in.
♦
A month before this, Noah and his team
Had flown to D.C. for the climate summit.
He’d barely been invited; Barfield Gates,
His contact in the White House, had arranged it
Last minute with the low-emissions panel,
Over the protests of the main committee.
You’d think that the inventor of the Blazo,
The solar battery we use today,
Would get a keynote, never mind an invite,
But Noah had burned his bridges long ago.
The sessions have been rough. It’s nothing new:
The post-consumerist economy,
Sustainability and zero growth,
The devil take the hindmost, we’ve got ours.
We tax until the carbon balance levels,
Build bigger walls and wait until the sea
Has got to its new normal, and the climate
Has settled into Pliocene El Niño.
So Noah’s message of initiative—
That half the human past is on its coasts,
That now it’s time we gardened the whole planet
And did what nature bred us up to do,
That offense is the best means of defense—
Has gone unheard, unanswered, or dismissed.
The air of the Four Seasons makes him sick
And Pennsylvania Avenue’s depressing.
Exhausted by the fight, he’s wandered down
To see the brand-new East Potomac levee,
A trap in his opinion, but a grand one:
It’s quite a climb; still, worth it in the end.
Up on the levee there’s a panorama:
The palm tree sweep on the Virginia side
Beyond the bay that swallowed Roosevelt Island,
Backed by the Rosslyn skyscrapers and towers;
And on the D.C. side, Noah can see
The obelisk, the dome of Jefferson,
The marble-walled Lincoln Memorial,
The distant looming of the Capitol.
It’s high tide, and like a dream the sea
Floats here above the land around it, holds,
In its calm, fleets of inverted clouds.
The bridges that once spanned it are all gone
(They can’t be raised, now shipped to Arizona,
Replaced by tunnels lit by LEDs)
And he can almost see the Chesapeake.
For him the break had come that afternoon,
Brushing white chocolate champagne cake away
From his coat-sleeve, where Terry Moyle had caught it
To tell him he must give up his campaign
To make the Earth his own pet guinea-pig.
Was Terry right? He represents good people,
The science office of the Vatican,
No wild-eyed Greens or bloated plutocrats.
Noah goes over in his mind the factions
Now set in play at the Four Seasons meeting.
First there’s traditional bizness, decent guys
With suits and haircuts, who just want to create
A level playing field, and make a profit,
And pour out smoke, inclined to fear new tech.
These make now a distinct minority,
Beginning to suspect they’re obsolete.
Noah likes them, but his plans are a hard sell.
Then there’s the statist group, who’ll be at Davos,
With better suits, and ponytails, who think
That the “commanding heights” idea has legs:
A crisis is a dreadful thing to waste.
They include democratic bureaucrats
And sheiks and warlords, kleptocrats and kings:
Strange bedfellows, weeping crocodile tears:
Needs must, alas, the state should take control.
The trouble is, they don’t want a solution:
The problem suits them fine, a rising tide
Of water and of refugees, the perfect
Mix for taxes, martial law, and wars.
The Russians and Canadians are in bed,
Happy to trade a million miles of tundra
For millions more of prairie, forest, farms,
The Arctic the new Mediterranean.
Now Barfield Gates is counted one of these,
But maybe sees a way to use Noah’s vision.
The next bunch Noah calls the New Rent Seekers,
Industrial environmentalists
Who’re the majority and hold the purse-strings:
They spend the money from the carbon taxes,
They know the crisis gives them an advantage
Over all other economic sectors:
Who prices energy controls the world.
The last thing they would want is that the problem
Just go away, as Noah thinks it can.
A gradual warming, worsening, will pay
Off big in massive engineering projects,
Real estate booms and relocation schemes
And biofuels that raise the price of food
And conservation schemes that—Glory Be!—
Are quite exempt from cost-effectiveness.
For Noah the weapons industry’s the worst.
For floods and droughts and ruined tropic farms,
And drowned coasts pitting frantic refugees
Against their erstwhile hinterlands, are splendid
Profit-centers for their precision wares.
The socialists, of course, welcome the crisis,
Last best contradiction of Capital.
For any stick will do to beat the Market,
Derail the so-called democratic state
(Which always was securely in the pocket
Of private finance and the rentier class)
And put in charge a technical elite
Devoted to the welfare of the people:
Flood the moral equivalent of war.
Here Noah sees a chance of some support:
Strange bedfellows again, that’s politics—
Here too he must keep quiet what he thinks.
What is his vision?—must remind himself.
Politics always does this to his head:
Cynicism the necessary sin.
He must consider that not all are tainted,
Remember those whose motives bear inspection:
Big gloomy Ala the agronomist,
That strange girl Lucy, with her Chinese eyes,
Chandra and Gopal out of Bangladesh,
The President, outgunned by her advisers,
Who’ll probably be voted off next year
(Her keynote yesterday was quite impressive).
Often these days the person’s better than
The cause she serves—perhaps a consequence
Of voting primaries, the slow erosion
Of upper houses in the parliaments,
And twenty-four hour newsbite coverage.
Noah recalls Jack Kilby, whom he met
Four years after he’d got his Nobel Prize.
Noah was in high school then, a prodigy,
And Kilby, who, to everyone’s surprise,
Had said “yes” to a teacher’s invitation,
Lectured to Noah’s advanced placement class.
There was a man, whose quiet brilliance
Had given to the world the microchip;
His self-effacing Texas sense of humor
Became the tone to which Noah would aspire.
And five years later, back from MIT,
He met the man who saved two billion lives,
That Norman Borlaug, who in India
Had got the world’s Green Revolution going.
He was to die that year, but Norm’s old eyes
Were still a bright and penetrating blue,
And his unprepossessing little house
In Dallas was a maze of files and screens.
Cheered by these memories, Noah plunges on.
So who else on his list might hurt or help?
The New Earth Firsters (Lucy once was one),
Who think technology’s to blame, and would,
By some occlusion of the consequences,
Abolish in their minds four thousand years
Of human interference with the planet
(Six billion people gone, including them)?
But Noah likes the vision of these guys—
Pantheists, Wiccans, ecofeminists—
At least they have some poetry, some dream.
So too the populist deniers, who say
That the great flood is not Man’s doing, but God’s.
The signs are there: it’s the Apocalypse.
They’re mostly Christian fundamentalists,
But in cahoots with radical Islam,
Their ancient quarrel shelved but not forgotten,
In honor of a common enemy.
Next up, prosaic by comparison,
The Global Conference of Coastal Cities.
The G3C (the obvious acronym),
Though quite divided and disorganized,
Offers real prospects for constructive moves.
They have the motivation, but not yet
The leadership that might drive new ideas.
Ala from Lagos is his favorite,
Though Dakha’s Chandra, Shanghai’s Zhang have promise,
And then there’s Dandolo, from drowning Venice,
And last, this clever Grotius from Holland,
Who couldn’t come, but Noah’s heard of her.
An island man himself these forty years,
Noah’s own natural constituency
Would be the IC, or the Islanders.
But there’s a problem that he can’t resolve
(Beside the tiny populations there
And corresponding lack of global pull).
As in the last five thousand years or so
There is no love lost between isle and shore.
Either the mainland rules unwilling islands
Or islanders raid wealthy mainland towns.
Noah must woo the G3C, the coasters;
The islanders regard this with suspicion.
Is he a mole, a sort of double agent,
Sent there to undermine their independence?
The Micronesians and Maldivians,
The folks from Nevis and Antigua,
May lose not only land but sovereignty,
Be forced by mainland states to toe the line.
Led by Maldivian Firushan Koi
The fiery president of that republic,
They must be brought to see their common cause
With their old enemies, and vice-versa.
The noblest of the people he must deal with,
The Ecumenical World Ethics Group,
Are also to his mind the most annoying.
Is it their ancient roots in Calvinism,
Or some fine Kantian scruple, that resists
The instrumentalizing of what is
In their regard, the realm of Ends, not Means?
Or just an ancient fear of playing God,
A sort of modesty or high-toned guilt,
Or dark Heideggerian Luddism,
That fuels their fear of geo-engineering?
This faction’s culture, though in origins
It’s Protestant, includes the “better sort”
Of Catholic activists like Terry Moyle
And many of his brainy Jesuit mentors.
The next group is in practice Noah’s own:
The techno-geek and eco-wonk brigade.
—Just as Noah’s mind has started to address
The question of how best to make their case,
He’s interrupted by a fellow-truant
Upon the Bund (as some folk call the levee).
♦
“You’re Noah Blazo, aren’t you?” It’s Lucy
(Wu Liqiu, which seems too hard for Anglos);
Another truant from the conference?
Like many others who have had the Treatment
It’s hard to tell her age. Her hair is white,
Her skin, though, smooth like that of a young girl.
Noah’s curious about her, for she left—
Or was she asked to leave?—the Earth First group;
And captured by her natural charisma
He wonders why. Was it the Treatment, then?
He knew that some Earth Firsters had refused it,
Making a choice no skeptic could dismiss.
Should a believer in the wheel of life
And death exempt herself from its effects?
Maybe some Firster coup had tossed her out.
Noah himself, back in the early days,
When he was one of the Twelve Guinea-Pigs,
Had found that people shunned him like a ghost,
But surely that old prejudice had waned.
“So you too needed to escape,” he says.
And now at once they are conspirators.
“You’re Dr. Wu. I’ve read about your work.
But aren’t you supposed to be presenting?”
“I changed my mind. To tell the truth, my friend,
I chased you here because I heard you speak
With Terry Moyle. You sounded so discouraged,
But what you said quite struck me, and I want
To find out more about what you intend.”
“Okay,” says Noah slowly, glancing at her,
Eyebrows raised in some alarm. He’s shocked
Both by the open frankness of her question,
And her abrupt familiarity.
“We’d have to start out with philosophy.
Sustainability—there’s no such thing.
No self-correcting permanent solution.
All systems, if they’re systems, are unstable.
I know you folks maintain”—and here she frowns—
“That Nature left alone is homeostatic,
A harmony of matter that’s divine,
A living process of the feminine
Of which the male’s a useful parasite.
True in some ways, but it’s not true in others—”
“Yes, yes,” she says. “I’ve come to see that now.
That cyclic harmony my friends adore
Is just the old eternity in disguise.
A circle is a point that’s been inflated.
A circle of unchanged block universes
Is still a block, with no way out of it.
Women, who know how different children are,
Ought to know better. Please don’t rub it in.
—But how do you propose to play the truant,
Make your escape from the old paradox
That perfect knowledge is predestination?
What kind of truth is it can set us free?”
Moved by the immediate rapport
He feels with this strange woman’s poetry,
He finds his own in its peculiar flow.
“Life, or to be more universal, every
Self-organizing system, sprouts the free.
Life is the maker of divergent times,
It’s violent and revolutionary.
Each species would, if it were given the chance,
Eat up the planet, starve, decay and die,
Or beget monsters that would eat their parents,
And in their standoff with each other, make
A splendid fan of new ecologies,
Galloping outward into that abstraction
We call the future, always out of balance,
Always controlled by feedbacks uncontrolled . . .”
Teasingly now she breaks in on his line:
“So you’re a libertarian, is that it?
You want a wild west of unbridled freedoms,
A lawless anarchy of market choice?”
“Now I’m the one,” smiles Noah ruefully,
“To make confession of my former follies.
I think I see it now: it is the rules,
The definitions and identities,
However ad hoc they may be, that shape
Entities distinct enough to play
The games that generate the unforeknown.
To make a picture, outlines must be drawn.
The rule of law is but a richer way
To bring out more and wilder innovations.
It’s not enough to leave it to the market
And fail to add some definite intention:
The market’s made up of intentions, choices;
We all must speak out in the conversation,
We must all make the moves that make the game—
And argue for whatever rules we want.
At worst the State’s a conversation-stopper,
A sausage made of ground-up dead ideas;
But at its best it’s like the rules of Chess,
Or better, like the rules of human syntax,
The portal to say all that can be said.
What we are after is the fertile play
That comes from the recursion of good games.”
“All very nice in theory,” she replies,
“But what has it to do with global warming,
And what do you propose to do about it?”
“Sometimes,” says Noah, “a single shock will do it.
So, given that the Earth’s ‘always already’
Falling into disaster, we propose
That there’s a better one to fall into.
We’re for the quick dirty technical fix.
If you set out to take Vienna, well,
Take Vienna. We don’t want just to slow
The warming and the global ocean rise;
We know we can reverse them, we’ve the tools,
They’re tested now, we’ll simply cool the planet—
The Pinatubo Chillout, that’s the name
Our geeks have chosen for the planet game.”
“Isn’t that still the old way of coercion?”
Lucy is serious now. “Force Nature, then,
If you cannot seduce her?” “But what if,”
Says Noah dreamily, “we’re Nature’s way
To make her own decisions for herself?
Why else would she evolve so odd a species?
Do I compel my leg to take a step,
Fall forward to the next foot-strike—or does
My body grow this free executive
To try a new place in a universe
Where stasis is the riskiest thing of all?
We are in Lewis Carroll’s caucus-race—
And now I think you’re a prospective Alice.”
They turn and suddenly stand face to face:
Two white-haired beings on the parapet
With that bizarre vitality of presence
Characteristic of the new undead.
“As you must see,” she says, “I’m up to something,
Impertinently interviewing you—
A sort of test, and I apologize.
We’re closer than you might have thought. In sum,
I want to offer to your enterprise
Whatever I can do in terms of knowledge,
Contacts, footwork, and my own research.
Maybe you are surprised I didn’t ask
About the nuts and bolts of what you’re doing.
I have been following your paper trail,
With, as I take it, the four part proposal
Together with the synergy you predict.
So let me know if I have got it right:
The solar battery, the iron banquet,
The sulfur shield, the harvest of the brine.”
“You’ve made a poem of it, I see that:
The four dimensions, length and breadth and depth
And time that gives the meaning to the others.
The only one I’ve got yet is the first;
Everyone’s frightened of the other three.
I was about to give it up and go,
Escape to Banks Island4 and lick my wounds.
But now you’re here I think there’s life in it.
So we are partners, then. Let’s shake on it.”
As they do so a copter passes over:
Marine One, carrying the President.
And when the racket fades she speaks again:
“I’ve got some thoughts how I can be of help.
I know you want to meet Firushan Koi,
That firebrand of the Maldive Islanders.
I also know you worked with Tata, on
Some concepts of reverse osmotic pressure
To use the ocean walls for energy.
Well, so did Chandrasekhar Engineer,
The Bangladeshi genius, and his son.
You know he surely lives up to his name;
Dhaka would long be drowned if not for him.
Now Chandra is a Parsi—” “That explains
Why he goes on about the Sun!” says Noah—
“And as you know, the Indian president,
Just been elected, Miland Khodayar,
Is Parsi too, and Chandra’s grandmother
Was born a Khodayar. What’s more,” she adds,
Chandra’s a good friend of Firushan Koi.”
♦
All right, all right. Another bunch of names,
Another complication in the plot.
Since, as it seems, it’s down to me to tell
The story (or at least to try to tell it
Without it turning into propaganda),
I’m going to have to give some backstory.
I can’t, as airy lyric poets do,
Just pick the bits that make a pretty posy
And leave the rest to common knowledge. No.
I’ve got to make the common knowledge gel
From scratch, and I’m a rotten choice for it,
If you ask me. I’m more the satirist,
And what you need is someone with the balls
To celebrate, to let it all hang out.
Lord, circumcise my lips, as someone said.
So some account of Noah’s “Four Dimensions”
Will have to wait until a better time.
Take it on faith for now, and we’ll get there.
It’s time to introduce some other players:
Big gloomy Ala, maybe? with her crew,
The terrifying “Mummy’s Boko Boys”5?
Or maybe, since we just were on the subject,
That Chandrasekhar Rama Engineer
And Gopal Gaya Sohrab Engineer
His brainy son, and how they joined the story.
They’re a mixed breed like others in our cast,
(Lucy, for instance, sort of Christian Buddhist;
Anneliese, the humanist and mystic;
And Ala, the Earth mother animist.)
Chandra and Gopal are an odd chimera:
Mix two parts Parsi, two parts Vedic and
A dash of Sufi, and you’ve almost got it.
They are from Atash-Khana, in old Dhaka,
The Parsi quarter by the Mughal fort.
Their red house with its traceries of stone
And sandalwood, its courtyard green and still,
Muffles the roar of the Jagannath Road.
It is eight feet above the old sea-level
(One foot above the new one, not unnoticed).
Chandra was raised in the hard-driving way
Of an ambitious Parsi family,
Given the latest implants from the States,
Expected to make money for the firm,
Provided with a pretty Parsi wife
To help him in a bid for public office.
But Chandra always was a fantasist;
Technology for him was just a way
To enter dream-landscapes of math and stars.
They blamed his mad Bengali grandfather,
A Vedic scholar and a full-blown mystic.
At first, though, Chandra lived up to their hopes—
A genius dissertation at DU,
Appointment to the Space Advisory Council,
A contract for the Ganga Barrage Dam;
And when the typhoon came in ’47,
Thought to have saved over a million lives.
But he was bored by the chaotic world
Of Bangladeshi politics and graft,
And took no kickbacks, waved away the credit,
And finally his wife, who was ambitious,
Had left him for a Japanese tycoon.
So he raised Gopal on his own, a boy
With creamy golden skin and huge dark eyes,
Who had inherited his father’s brains.
Chandra was thin, short, agile, smiled a lot,
And moved with an unconscious elegance:
Another white-haired one, a springy mop
Above a lean brown visage full of life.
Gopal was taller by a head, and had
Something of an endearing gangliness.
Gopal was only two when Chandra drove
The geosynchronous Bengali sat,
Ordered which floodgates open, which to close,
When Buriganga, swelled with melted snow,
Met the freak spring typhoon Sudarshanam,
The discus of Lord Vishnu, in the groin
Of the subcontinent. Almost as if
The flow of water was a music that
Obeyed a Fourier function in its waves,
(Confusing flood with sound and head with heat,
Viscosity with electrical resistance),
Chandra conducted symphonies of math
And came home to his son a nation’s hero.
But in the process, something troubled Chandra,
That month by month would brighten his brown eyes
And send him back to Google and to school.
All he had done in the typhoon, he saw,
Was play a surface game, mostly a case
Of weightings on a two-dimension plane.
He now began to see an underworld:
The vales and mountains of the water-table,
The aquifers piled age on age, divided
By barriers of impermeable stone,
And layered by specific gravity,
Fresh water floating upon thicker brine.
And then it seemed to him that one might sculpt
A water-table landscape underground
Of saturation and unsaturation,
By sucking out or pumping in or fracking,
Until the mantle had become a shape
That safely could absorb a flood, or drive
A fountain of pure water in a desert.
One could make dams of negative conduction,
And great canals of fractionated rock,
Releasing ancient lodes of fossil water,
Driving new waters into dried-up channels,
Wicking away fault-triggering lubricant.
The mathematics, too, began to blossom
In Chandra’s head, between the endless meetings,
The hours he spent instructing wee Gopal,
The budget fights inside his Institute.
He now saw space as pulsing, full of life,
Determining itself by mass and magnetism
In infinite regression into time.
He came across the work of his great namesake
Subrahmanyan6, on collapsing stars,
And recognized in some dim way a form
Of math that maybe underpinned it all.
It was the topological equivalent
Of hudor7, the first element, the point
Where energy condensed out into matter,
The element that fuels all the suns,
The waters over which the white dove flew.
♦
Permit, dear reader, these peculiar types,
Whose recondite imaginings must seem
So dull compared with social media.
Well might you look down on their nerdiness,
And murmur something about Asperger’s.
But this is harsh. There may be some of you
Who get it, who have felt the blaze of insight
Grow like a brilliant bulging mushroom cloud
Behind the public surface of your face.
And don’t let my voice, scarred by disappointment,
Distract you from their luminous innocence.
For now I must return us to the levee
Where evening light now lovely and candescent
Falls on and pinkens the Potomac Sea.
Sometimes a person, in another’s eyes,
Can suddenly reveal another world.
To those disciples on the Mount it seemed
Their friend was clothed in white light, and he spoke
With people from a strange millennium.
So Lucy for a moment is transfigured,
Revealing what she is in that eve-light.
This very down-to-earth old Chinese lady
Is as it were a whole new continent
As different from this as is the mood
Of the odd dream you just awakened from.
She’s really the eternal wayward girl.
Something has happened to her—that is clear.
Was it the caves she haunted when, a child,
Raised by her grandmother beside the Yangtze,
She read the inscribed poems of Li Bai?
Or was it later when, the AI guru,
She taught a thousand qubits how to sing?
Or later, when she got the treatment (forced
Upon her by the State to save their asset)
And saw eternity in a grain of sand?
To Noah her gold face is a true mask,
The youthful visage of a sort of god
Beneath its helmet of white hair, now lit
By the mild rays of the Virginia sun.
He has not felt this way since Jean was drowned
Out by Banks Island nineteen years ago,
But this is different, the difference
Between a loving reverence and awe.
Well, I’m surprised to hear myself this way.
Can poets be redeemed by what they say?
Put on the right robes and then strangely find
They’ve put on something of another mind?
Or am I getting sentimental, buying
The drug we use to feel we aren’t dying?
♦
Perhaps I’d better tell another story,
One that is dark enough for such as I:
How Ala came to turn out as she did,
Depressive, silent, huge, and formidable.
Ala grew up in Lagos, tall and slim,
Her parents mixed, Igbo and Yoruba,
In one of those big messy Catholic families,
This one quite wealthy, with the offshore oil.
Her Igbo dad was quite an engineer,
Her mother from a farming family—
Groundnuts, manioc, and the cocoa bean.
They still for old time’s sake on ritual days
Cooked up a mound of steaming thick cassava,
Sweet and sour-throaty, fragrant, glutinous,
And dipped it in the salty relishes.
But Ala wasn’t your nice Catholic girl:
She talked her Daddy into driving lessons,
Was active on the social media,
And had a lively interest in young men.
Seeing that she already hoped to pose
For Lagos’s unending beauty contests,
By sixteen they had sent her north to school.
The night of the attack, the school put on
George Bernard Shaw’s strange play, Saint Joan. Of course
With her charisma, Ala got the part.
The Brit director saw within the loud
And pretty girl something she did not know,
And he was right. The play was a success,
The townsfolk mostly loved it, though a few
Went out with dark looks after it was over.
And six hours afterwards, just before dawn
The shooting started near police headquarters
And climaxed in the market shortly later.
The local barracks fled back down the road
To Gombe, and the brave police chief died.
Girls were what they had come for, what a boy
Driven south by the Sahara’s blighting march,
Workless, illiterate, and dispossessed,
From some once proud Fulani caliphate
Or Hausa chieftaincy, could never have
Except by the Jihad. The pretty ones
Were kept, of course, for sale, but there were others.
Ala and her distraught dorm-mates were rushed
Into an outbuilding where stores were kept,
And silenced. Then the school went up in flames.
The teachers held the doors. Five minutes later
A fusillade destroyed the locks, and in
They came, grinning and waving guns. The staff
Were shot at once, including Mr. Webb
Her drama teacher, and the headmistress.
The boy who clumsily blindfolded Ala
Was sweaty, smelled of urine, smoke, and cordite,
And felt her up while setting her in line.
Now Ala all this time was full of Joan,
The virgin, La Pucelle, whom she had played,
And oddly was not in the least afraid,
But angry, angry, as she’d never been.
Now she would play the witch, let them find out.
Ala, despite puberty, was no fool.
She’d taken in more of her education
Than anyone yet knew. As they drove north,
The truck groaning as it switched between ruts,
She had a good idea where it was going.
She managed to maneuver her blindfold
To see beneath it, and the truck’s back flap,
Loosed to provide some ventilation, gave
A glimpse of an appalling desolation.
What had been farms were now grey dustbowls marked
By skeletons of trees and burned out cars.
Sometimes ten miles of sand-dunes wandered by,
Sometimes they parked beneath oasis palms
And the insane heat softened for a while,
The still air rank with the scent of gasoline.
The back was laced up while they crossed a border,
Long talk and laughter, smell of cigarettes,
Some words in French and creole Arabic,
A jerrycan of water pushed on through.
She was convinced that now they were in Chad,
And when the back was opened, finally,
She recognized the towers of Ndjamena
Peering above the trees of a walled garden
And saw through palms the waters of a river,
Probably the Chari or Logone
(She’d visited the place with Daddy long ago).
They took the blindfold off her for the auction,
Wanting of course to show her eyes and teeth.
She certainly came up to expectations.
Ala had soon decided that compliance
Would be her method. She was very sweet;
Convinced her new possessor she was thrilled
To have this new adventure with a man
(Yes, not bad-looking in a pale plump way),
Who let her watch as his blue Gulfstream banked
Across the weird islands of Lake Chad
Frosted with natron, the embalmer’s spell.
Her heart shrank not with fear but calculation;
There was no way they’d get away with this.
The way to deal with terror was to be
The terror in itself, and turn a face
Of the Medusa on her terrifiers.
Soon she was mistress of the charming compound
In the Nafusa, south of Tripoli.
Sex was no problem for her; he was kind
And she enjoyed it sometimes, as if she
Were by herself but it was not a sin.
She learned the bowing and the purifying.
The other wives were jealous; she forgave them.
She waited, found a lost knife in the kitchens,
Sharpened it carefully, and waited more.
He let her shop in town, with just a driver;
She wheedled till she got a credit card.
Upon their three-month anniversary
She had her chance. She’d planted in his mind
The thought of a safari, just for two,
The tent out in the desert, the gazelles,
The airy mountains, and the sun-warmed sands.
They found him in his bed there four days later,
Beheaded, with his penis in his mouth.
Everyone always has to sleep sometime.
Beside him was a sheet of printer paper
With three suras typed from the holy book:
“He does not recognize the uncircumcised.”
“Eat not of the unclean flesh of the pig.”
“That which is done to one, be done to all.”
Ala had planned it all quite carefully.
She’d slipped into an internet café
In Tripoli, and got a message out.
He’d let her practice with his new Land Rover;
She drove it to the airport, left it there,
And Sunday, her beloved bodyguard
(Who’d be the first of Ala’s Boko Boys)
Was waiting with a passport and a ticket,
And some hours later she was back in Lagos.
But now she was a very different girl.
Her parents loved her but no longer knew her.
She studied hard, put on a lot of weight,
Disappeared once and came back gloomier still
(Having decided not to burden them
With all the grief and guilt of her abortion),
Got into Lagos University
And started her spectacular career.
What fascinated her was agriculture:
She’s seen what deserts humans could produce
And then the deserts that the deserts made
In human hearts and souls. The dried-up lakes,
The natron barrens, all-engulfing dunes,
The desolation of the old Sahel,
Seemed like an army or a locust swarm
That she was born to fight. And as she found,
Another horde was coming from the south,
The creeping rise of the infertile brine
That pushed the Ogun river up its throat
And, full of refuse, poured in block by block
Upon the Lagos slums. For her the river
Became a dying god who must be healed,
And aquaculture was, she saw, the art
Of turning brine into a living garden.
Meanwhile the evil word of what had happened
Spread quickly into Libya and beyond.
Witchcraft was feared as it had always been.
Would men who died that way be recognized,
Standing before the gates of Paradise,
Or as unclean fall down into Jahannam?
Another girl, inspired by Ala, tried
The same thing she did, but was caught and killed:
Too eager, made the big mistake of starting
At the wrong end, not silencing him first.
But soon those nice black girls were not so much
In vogue or in demand as heretofore.
The trade fell off a bit, the gentlemen
Not so enthusiastic for its wares.
Giving a new meaning to “counter-terror,”
Ala had put a damper on the boom.
Somehow, despite her melancholy,
Her silences and her insane work ethic,
Ala was popular with all her classmates.
For she was kind and infinitely patient
With those she tutored, and was soon to teach.
Her women students opened up their voice,
Her young men found in their imaginations
Ways that the wasted could be put to use,
Ways that one discipline lit up another,
Water whose foulness could be turned to fertile,
Weeds that in other places might be flowers
And food and homes and clothing for the people.
The young men had become her honor guard,
And called her “Mummy,” not “Professor” now.
When later someone from Ansaru found
That Ala might have been the first “bad girl,”
A brief attempt was made upon her life.
Her “boys,” by chance, were partying with Sunday
When the would-be assassins came on campus.
Uche Okonkwo, her first follower,
Had trained in kidnapping security,
And he and Sunday knew just what to do.
They served the killers just as Ala served
Her ex, and mailed the missing pieces home.
This was the start of Mummy’s Boko Boys.
♦
One missing piece in Noah’s grand design
Is how to manage seacoast agriculture.
He sees that he needs experts, and he knows
That Lucy sees that too. “So one more thing,”
He says, “ I wonder, might you chance to know—“
“Yes, Ala Ifa-Eshu,” she breaks in,
A smile upon her face, “Indeed I do.”
“So it’ll be like this from here on in,”
He laughs, “You’re always going to get there first.”
“We wanted her to join the Ecofems,
But she’s got sick of putting it to men,
And so have I. Yes, Ala’s whom you want.
I’ll introduce you to her after dinner.”
“Which won’t be long,” he says, “we’d better hurry.
Let’s eat together. And I meant to ask
What is an expert on cryptography
Doing around a global-warming meet?”
As they walk back, Lucy begins explaining.
“Cryptography is just a sideline, Noah.
We are the pros in quantum computation.
My team is trying to emulate in qubits8
What human synapses can do en masse.
It’s not exactly AI that we’re after,
But really Natural Intelligence,
Of which the animal brain is one example.
You see we think about it upside down.
For us the universe already thinks.
The thinking process is called ‘evolution,’
From the first Planck chronon9 of the Big Bang
Through the survival of genetic strains
To the most recent firing of a neuron.
Intelligence is all distributed:
We are just trying to tap into it.”
“This is the first time,” Noah comments wryly,
“That I’ve heard anyone make sense on this.
If what they call intelligence is real,
It’s part of nature, just like gravity.
The world designs itself from the beginning.
But Lucy, you’re avoiding my last question.
What does this have to do with ocean rise?”
“It struck us that the nicest test—of what
We’d argued in our papers—was the weather.
All weather is just ‘butterfly effects.’
Mostly they cancel out, and in the short run
Weather can be predicted, but ‘black swans,’
Anomalies that aren’t cancelled out,
The ones that cause the really massive changes,
Can’t normally be found from their effects.
We realized the problem was the same
As digging out factorials from large numbers,
An easy trick for quantum computation.
So here we are, ready to go to work
To help you deal with massive climate change.”
“And here we are,” says Noah as they turn
Down Twenty-Ninth Street in the evening light,
The smell of leather, perfume and cigars,
The cooling air, the street lamps coming on.
1 A blockchain is a distributed secure database owned by the commons that contains the complete history of a transaction; a ledger hardened against tampering that creates a basis for mutual trust and mechanizes the concept of what is due.↩
2 The celebrated old Indonesian restaurant in the former museum district of Amsterdam↩
3 Rembrandt’s possibly most famous and well-loved painting↩
4 Not one of the two Banks Islands in Canada, but the Pacific island in Polynesia.↩
5 A grim and very African jest at the expense of the Boko Haram, whose name means literally “Western books forbidden.” “Mummy’s Boko Boys” are a counter-terror organization with a cozy nice-boy’s name.↩
6 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar gave his name to the Chandrasekhar Limit, the minimum size of star that, when it collapses, will form a black hole.↩
7 Ancient Greek for water: root of “hydrogen”↩
8 The fundamental “bit” or unit of quantum information, consisting of the superposition of two states of the same elementary wave/particle.↩
9 The smallest possible physical unit of time↩