The Long Cold

Chapter One: The Ledger

At eleven minutes before noon, Joyce Miller carried the milk can out of the house and set it on the flat basalt stone she had dragged there for that purpose nine years ago.

The can had been a milk can once. Now it was a tube of galvanized steel with the bottom cut out, a camera lens seated in a collar of hammered lead at the top, and a paper target inside coated with a strip of light-sensitive film she made herself from salvaged emulsion and a great deal of swearing. There was a brass sight welded to the side, a bubble level from a carpenter's square, and a hand-scratched scale she had calibrated one desperate week using the moon, a candle, and a set of platinum plates she had carried out of her old life in a coffee tin.

She leveled the can. She swung it on its pivot until the sun's disk dropped through the sight and lay in the ring on the target like a coin in a cup.

Then she waited, because the sun was not in a hurry and neither was she.

The sky above the lava country was the color of skim milk left out too long. It had been that color, more or less, for eleven summers. People who had been children when it changed did not know that a sky could be anything else. Joyce was fifty-eight years old and she remembered blue the way some people remember a song they cannot quite hum: she knew it had existed, she knew it had been good, and the details were leaving her a little at a time.

At noon exactly, by the wind-up clock she kept in her shirt pocket, she read the target.

"Point four four," she said aloud, to the goats, who were not listening.

She took the can back inside, down the four stone steps into the cool, and lit the lamp on the table. The house had been a lava tube before it was a house. Some old eruption had left a long bubble under the plain, and a century of frost had collapsed a hundred feet of its roof into a trench, and Ted had roofed the trench with creosoted rail ties hauled two at a time behind the mule, and packed the ties with cinder and sod. It kept fifty degrees in August and fifty degrees in January. It smelled of tar and goat and dry sage and, faintly, always, of Ted.

The ledger lay open on the table. It was the ninth. The first eight were on the shelf above the stove in a row, their canvas covers stamped with a circle and a wing and three words she had stopped reading years ago.

She wrote: *July 2 — clear, no haze layer at horizon, wind SW light. Optical depth 0.44. 11 goats. Spring flow steady, 2 gal/min. Garden: beans flowering, squash set, potatoes fine.*

She blew on the ink, though the ink dried instantly in that air, because blowing on ink was what her mother had done.

Nobody read the ledgers. Nobody had ever read the ledgers. That was not the point. The point was that somebody, somewhere, ought to be writing down what the sky was doing, and as far as Joyce Miller knew, in a circle three hundred miles across, that somebody was her.

---

The afternoon went the way afternoons went.

She milked out the two does that were still in milk and set the pails in the spring box. She walked the fence line on the north side where the pronghorn came through, and found a stay wire broken and spliced it. She pulled cheatgrass out of the ditch that carried water from the spring to the garden. The garden lived under glass—forty-one window sashes scavenged out of three dead towns, set on a frame of pipe and rail tie, sealed with tar and rag. Under the glass it was a different planet. Under the glass it was the world she had grown up in. Beans climbed string. Squash leaves lay broad and insolent. The air was thick and green and it made her eyes sting every time, the way church made some people's eyes sting.

Outside the glass, the growing season in that country ran about sixty-one days and had been known to run nine.

Gus stood in the shade of the rock outcrop with his bad side to the wind. He was a mule, nineteen years old, the color of wet cement, with one eye gone to a wire cut in the second winter and the other eye as clear and unforgiving as a judge's. He had hauled every rail tie in the roof over her head. He allowed Joyce to touch his ears, which he allowed nobody else, there being nobody else.

"Long day," she told him.

He shifted his weight and did not comment.

She fed the goats. She counted them twice, the way she always did, and got eleven twice. She ate a supper of goat's milk, flatbread, and last year's beans, standing up, out of the pan.

At eight-fifty she wound the receiver.

---

It was a hand-cranked set in a cedar box, the guts of it older than she was, and it drew one station and one station only: a narrowband beacon transmitting from a flat black plain two hundred and thirty miles to the northeast, on a frequency that bent nicely along the ground and rolled over hills the way water rolls over stones.

At nine o'clock the carrier came up with a soft click, like a door being unlatched in another room.

Then the voice.

It was a woman's voice, or had been built out of pieces of one, in a lab, twenty-some years ago. It was pleasant and flat and it had never once in eleven years changed its pace, hesitated, or cleared its throat.

*"Stratospheric Aerosol Program. Station Zero. Automated advisory. Time, twenty-one hundred hours."*

Joyce sat down on the bench with her hands around a cup of hot water.

*"Feedstock inventory, fourteen thousand two hundred and ten metric tonnes. Current dose index, four point one. Launch count to date, two hundred eighty-one thousand, six hundred and four. Fleet status, nominal. Next scheduled window, zero five forty. This is an automated advisory. There is no operator on this circuit."*

Click. Carrier down. The hiss of the dead band came back in like water filling a hole.

There is no operator on this circuit. It said that every night. Joyce did not know who had written that line into the script, but she had a guess, and the guess was that it had been a lawyer.

She wrote the three numbers in the ledger under the day's optical depth, as she had written them for eleven years, first in a hand that shook, later in a hand that did not.

It was a machine talking to itself across three hundred miles of country where almost nobody lived, reciting its accomplishments to the dark. Joyce had known the men and women who built it. Some of them had been fools and some of them had been the best people she ever worked beside and all of them had assumed, without ever quite saying it, that there would always be somebody in the room.

There was nobody in the room.

She had gotten used to the voice the way you get used to a clock ticking. After Ted died coughing rust into a rag, the voice had been the only thing that spoke in that house. After Abigail—

She did not finish the thought. She had a rule about that, and the rule was: not at night.

She banked the stove, blew out the lamp, and lay listening to the goats shift in their pen and the wind come off the plain the way it did every night, dry and cold in July, smelling of dust and old fire.

---

She had been thirty-three when she first walked out onto the lava at the place they called the Loft.

It had been an artillery range before it was anything, a rectangle of public nothing the size of a small country, chosen because it was flat, because it was high, because the air above it was dry, and because there was nobody underneath to complain. They put up four hangars and a gantry field and a hopper line and a control building with green tile in the corridors, and they filled a hollow on the south side with a hill of yellow sulfur eighty feet high, and Joyce Miller, who had come out of instrumentation with a bad marriage behind her and a soldering iron in her bag, spent eleven years of her life learning to read the light that came down through what they put up.

Winged balloons, was the plain-language version. Thin white autonomous gliders, fifty feet across, that inflated in the cold dark before dawn and rose through the troposphere and kept rising, trimming themselves, holding station at sixty-five thousand feet, until on command they burned their payload of sulfur into vapor that oxidized into fine bright droplets and spread out on the stratospheric winds into a veil.

They did not stop the sun. They took two percent of it. Two percent, worldwide, forever, was enough to hold the heat down, and the heat had needed holding down; the grain belts had been cooking, the wheat had been failing three years in five, and the alternative on the table was not a nice cool argument in a nice cool room. She had believed in it. She still, on most days, believed in it, and that was the hardest part of the whole business.

They took two percent of the sun and gave the world back its wheat, and somewhere in the taking they moved the rain.

The monsoon did not fail all at once. It stuttered, it came late, it came thin, and two billion people who lived on it looked at the sky and then looked west at the people who had written on it. The rice wars did not last long as wars go. They did not need to. What they broke was not cities. What they broke was everything that made cities possible: the grid, the freight, the medicine, the money, the patient enormous habit of strangers cooperating. The lights went out region by region like a man walking down a hallway turning off lamps.

And above all of it the fleet kept flying, because the fleet had been built to keep flying. Redundant. Autonomous. Self-scheduling. Hardened against interruption, because the one thing the designers had truly feared, back when the world was rich and argumentative, was that some government or some mob would shut it off overnight and dump a decade of withheld heat onto the planet in a single summer.

So they made it very, very hard to stop.

They never got around to making it easy to ease down.

Joyce Miller turned over on her cot, in a hole in the lava under a roof of railroad ties, and slept.