The rains fail

a tale of climatology

The fragile young soil was half-planted with spring seeds when they noticed the seasonal rains were not coming. The winds that carried the moisture from the sea had failed, and hot and parching air from the other direction arrived instead, blowing out of the salt wastes in the east. Something had gone wrong, something unpredicted, something dangerous.

Word was sent to neighboring polises. “Is it so here, too?” And it was. The rains had failed, and they failed there, and there, and everywhere. Meetings were held from Penesthelia to Zoan.

There was no rain.

And as bad, the heat came early. The summer was harsh, several degrees hotter than usual, in coursing waves of agony; the delicate trees withered, the vines were scorched and limp, the soil powdered on the regolith, and the rocks showed through: the bones of things the settlers had tried to cover.

Only the native plants did not suffer, but what could kill them? As old as they all were, most of them probably had grown through worse.

But the native flora was useless and inedible: woven glass instead of cellulose.

The polises met, two, three, and four in council, and the climatologists shook their heads. “Something has been disturbed; the patterns are broken. We’re doing studies. The patterns may settle again but in a different form.”

“What form?”

“We don’t know.”

“That’s not helpful. We can’t grow crops. When can we plant?”

The green shoots came up, turned yellow, and faded, daded back into the dirt as if they never had been.

“Next year, perhaps?”

“Next year!”

“The hell you say!”

“We can’t eat next year today.”

“Come home with me and tell my children all about next year.”

The seashore towns sent out more boats with nets, but the fish stocks were thin, and the new biomes were not yet stable. The struggling islands sent what food they could, which was little, and they could fish no more than they were already. The pumping stations pulled water from billion-year-old aquifers, but there was always an energy shortage, and the sun grew fierce.

The drought was not so bad on the other side of the planet, but it was bad enough. At least the dusty settlement of Clytemnestra and its support communities were only hungry, not starving but hardly had anything to share with the desperate western hemisphere.

Why had the world turned off its rain? Who knew? Superstitions already creeping in flourished.

“It’s trying to throw us off!” some said. “It hates us.”

“Where are we to go?” others demanded. “A hundred and fifty thousand of us came! But now there’s five million of us! It had better get used to us.”

“Or kill us.”

People went and talked to the hills and the valleys and the alien plants, but the scientists scoffed. “We changed the moisture balances, and the winds changed. It’s just a stutter. It may be just a misbalance in a natural cycle that we caught at the wrong moment. It will fade, and we’ll rebuild and push it into the new pattern. Everything will be fine.”

“Fine! When? How soon?”

“A year? Two years? Three? Then the new pattern will have to assume its shape.”

“What, then? A decade?”

“Maybe.”

“We’ll be dead then!”

“We just have to make do until then.”

“My baby needs milk now, not in a decade!”

Prayers were said to old faces, old faces with new names.

Then the Fever came, and everyone suffered: Aulis, Calypso, Helioshad, even distant Clytemnestra. Shallow graves were dug, and then pits.

“At least the dead don’t eat!”

“Well, they don’t work, either.”

Should more clones be made? But those were mouths, too. Should food be made? Biosphere could make tonnes of yeast gruel, but they still needed plants and animals, and microbes to try to stabilize the soil. Besides, yeast gruel was the next best thing to inedible.

“We appreciate the thanks,” the Director of Biosphere said sarcastically. “There’s people eating grass in Argoshaan, haven’t you heard?”

The tenuous shadow of Earth on Iphigenia faded, and millions stared in half-empty bowls and looked at each other.

Who should live, and who should die?

Who should live? Who should die? And who, who should decide?

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