Welcome back to my post-post-apocalyptic novel, Ada’s Children, and thanks for reading! If you’re new to the story, please don’t be surprised that it’s paywalled. The Prologue and first three chapters are free, and you can start reading them here. The previous chapter, “Dance of the Full Moon,” is here.
The last time we were with Carol, she had just been turned back from the US border with New Texas, having said goodbye to Michael and Shondra one last time. Now she’s trying to get on with her life, developing a curriculum for one of the classes she used to teach. But she just can’t concentrate, so she opts for a distraction.
JANUARY 2043
Carol tramped through the snow, sinking to her calves, exhilarated to be outside after a morning at home working on her laptop. Ten or twelve inches had already fallen, with more coming down in dense flurries. She felt like she used to when she was a kid, as if she were one of those tiny figures in a snow globe. There was something comforting in the image. The peacefulness of falling snow. The carefree hours of a day off of school. Making snow angels and snow people with the neighbor kids. All contained in a protective sphere where everything was safe, predictable.
At least that’s what a good winter storm used to mean. But no more. It was January, and this was the first solid snow of the season. The winter storms came irregularly, and when they did, they dumped snow by the foot. Heavy, wet stuff, not like the light flakes you could barely form into a ball.
Then Cass and his cronies would claim the globe couldn’t be warming if it still snowed this much. But the asshole president would have nothing to say when the predicted January thaw sent all this frozen liquid downstream to flood Davenport and St. Louis. That’s why she was out in it today; she wanted to enjoy it before it turned into slush, then ice, then disappeared for good.
That, and Craig had called, asking if she wanted to come over. She’d been staring blankly at her laptop screen for half an hour, making no progress on the course outline she was updating for “Rhetoric of the Climate Crisis.” The AIs might have figured out how to teach any class, but they weren’t creative enough to design one yet, leaving this bit of contract work for otherwise redundant professors.
And this class was her baby. She’d first pitched it to the state university when she’d been teaching there, back in the thirties. Back when they had some chance of holding warming under anything like an acceptable level. When humanity had been headed for massive discomfort and expensive storm damage, not mass drowning and heat death.
The course started at the beginning, back in the 1970s with scientists’ first too-hesitant warnings, then the oil company-funded think tanks’ campaign of denial, rebranding “global warming” as “climate change,” right through the environmental groups’ more alarmist rhetorical strategies. The alarmists had been vindicated by events, small comfort though it was. There was the lost decade of the teens, followed by the more militant rhetorical and political strategies of Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement. But even then, most efforts were of the too little, too late variety.
Now, since Cass’s election, the course had new approaches to cover. Few these days questioned the existence of the climate crisis; it was simply that nothing could be done about it anyway. And Cass had his own extra-racist spin on this argument: “If the brown people would just stop having so many babies, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” Never mind that birthrates everywhere in the world were at 2.1 or below—acknowledging this new reality wouldn’t give the white supremacists anyone to blame. New coal-fired power plants were already coming online, not bothering with the “clean” technology that had been developed before the US banned coal outright. “It’s not doing any good in the ground,” Cass would say at the many rallies he held in Appalachia and Wyoming.
That should give her plenty of grist for this new course unit, which she’d titled “The White Right to Pollute.” But the words wouldn’t come. Her brain felt as frozen as the world outside.
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