Previous: Chapter 4. Autumn
Chapter 5. Winter
Àrd-Dhìthreabh, February 2062
It was early afternoon on a typical West of Scotland winter day. In this season, Suna always tried to spend as much of the short days outside as possible, even if it meant less business. It was a matter of survival. So here she was on the beach at Bàrr Fhasaidh, with the tide coming in, driven by the cold, merciless wind. It also brought showers of horizontal sleet, stinging her face and whipping at her clothes. During such squalls, everything was a gloomy grey, as if the sun had already set, or maybe never risen. Visibility was only a few paces, but she trundled on regardless. And although they seemed to last like an eternity, soon the sun would break through the clouds, the beach and dunes would lit up and you would feel the warmth on your face, and it was glorious to be out.
The day before, a new message from Dad had come. As usual, it was a memory card with pictures of sand and a few cryptic notes. Suna still thought it was very clever to combine one-time pads and steganography, and the sand pictures always had a certain poetry. Mama had written a small script that figured out which key to use to get the stego message, then which pad to use to decrypt it. She had very likely also written the scripts Dad used to create the images.
Suna had been worried about what would happen if Dad lost his one-time pads. Mama had said, “Then he’ll mail me a poem. If that happens, I mail him back the sand pictures. If he receives them all right, he knows what to do. If not, he’ll send me a song lyric. If that happens, from then on we’ll fall back on a mathematical function we agreed on as a pseudo-random generator. Some Euler-Riemann zeta function. Your Dad’s not a great coder but I have left all he needs scattered across the internet and he knows where to find it. If he can’t find a computer, he’ll resort to manual encryption. Very slow, but he has a lot of time anyway.” She had smiled rather wickedly and added, “Strength in depth.” Suna had been impressed. So far, it had not been necessary: the sand pictures had kept coming.
When Dad had written this letter, he’d been in Japan. Unusually, there were some pictures that were not purely sand or beaches. Normally, Dad limited himself to descriptions of the places he visited. But this time he’d taken pictures. One in particular was taken from high up on a headland on the Miura peninsula, looking out over the partially flooded coastline. Another one showed a view of a partially submerged large city. There were several tall building still standing. Somehow the concrete rot hadn’t affected them. Maybe because they stood in the sea? From the shape of the tallest one, there could be no doubt it was Yokohama. Another picture showed a sea of tall waving grasses. He said it was called hachijōsusuki, or simply kaya. Suna recognised the scenes right away: they were straight out of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō, an old manga that had been a favourite of Dad and Mama. They had often read it together. It was uncanny how close those pictures were to the drawings. No Alpha, Dad wrote. No robotto, what a shame. Very likely no taapon either. It was fiction after all.
The letter also described scenes in Kyōto and Kagoshima. Kyōto had fared relatively well. Somehow, many of the earthquake-proof concrete buildings had not been affected, and its climate had somehow not been affected as much as other parts of Japan, probably the surrounding hills providing some micro-climate. Suna had never been there, none of them had, but she knew it had been a kind of spiritual home for Dad.
She knew that Kagoshima had once been a good place to live despite being right next to a live volcano, Sakurajima, which often covered the city in a thin layer of ash. Now it was too hot most of the year and a large part of the city was under the sea. And of course the volcano was still active. But people were still living there. And like the cities in Vietnam, it had become a very green place full of tall trees with wide canopies. From a distance, it looked almost like a rainforest, and that was apparently exactly the idea, to create something like a rainforest ecology. People lived under those trees, which sheltered them both from the sun and the ashes, and provided them with food as well. They even grew excellent coffee. Ostensibly, that was why Dad had gone there: to taste that coffee. Suna smiled, coffee was of course another key ingredient of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō.
But although the letter didn’t say so (it never talked about the next destination), to Suna, Kagoshima was obviously his stepping stone to the Ryūkyū islands. Unlike in the story, Japan was now effectively a closed-off country because of the sakoku policy. And although the politicians would have preferred to get rid of the Ryūkyū, in practice that was impossible as they grew the vegetables and fruit for most of Japan. That put them in a very powerful position, and they were not nearly as closed-off as the rest of Japan. As a result they had become the gateway for smuggling of goods and people to and from Japan, and the local authorities turned a blind eye. It was the ideal place to get in or out the country.
Closer to An Truthail, debris from the recent storm littered the beach. Teams of beachcombers were sifting through it. It was a familiar scene. When she came closer, she saw that one of the teams were all Chinese, or at least East-Asian, like herself. Probably recent immigrants who had not found employment yet. It reminded her of Dad’s previous letter, the one she thought of as the “China Letter”, and which she knew he had written especially for her.
From Kunming, Dad had traced his way to Shanghai via a long pseudo-random route, first moving east along a corridor of relatively moderate temperature, and then north up the coast. Apart from the now familiar devastation of the concrete rot, the lands in this first part had been relatively unaffected by climate change. There were of course the now-ubiquitous localised floods and droughts. As in so many other places, the habitable and arable land area had been reduced considerably as huge swathes had been sacrificed as floodplanes. In Jianxi and Fujian provinces, the more frequent and longer droughts had led to an increase in the bamboo forests for which the region was famous. But the region remained suitable for human habitation. Closer to Shanghai, that was no longer the case. Temperatures had become almost unbearably hot, and coastal cities had no choice but turn into inhabited forests. Wenzhou had turned into a forest of Chinese banyan trees, which was both a practical choice, as they grow tall and wide and were remarkably adaptable to urban environments, and a poetic one, as it had been the official City Tree for nearly a hundred years and was a symbol of endurance and spiritual growth.
Where the trees would not grow only barren land remained, quickly turning into desert as the topsoil was washed away by frequent excessive rain, and the vegetation could not recover sufficiently because of the heat. But people were inventive. In many of those wastelands, solar panels had bloomed. Part of their energy harvest was used for irrigation and together with the shelter they offered, that had made agriculture possible and halted further desertification. Apparently, it was a lesson learned the hard way: without the vegetation, the dust from topsoil erosion would cover the solar panels. Cleaning them was too expensive, and many of the early operators had lost the fight against the dust, until someone had come up with this solution.
Dad’s final destination in China had been Shanghai, to witness the enormous submerged area covering most of Jiangsu province, all the way north up to Lianyungang. There was a part in the letter where he addressed her directly: “Suna, I did try and find your family. I knew it was pointless, the local authorities would have tried to trace them long ago, but I felt I had to. I didn’t succeed. But I did manage to visit your parents’ home. That neighbourhood of Shanghai is now completely under water. The typhoon broke the defences and they were never rebuilt because the sea level rise was too rapid anyway. Then the land sunk even further under the pressure of the water. But there are companies there that offer this service: you give them the coordinates and they take you there in a little fishing boat and lower you in a kind of transparent plastic diving bell, so you can visit the place under water. Your parents had lived in a modern apartment block, and most of it still stood there. I left a little memento at the front door. Back on the boat I burnt ghost money for them.”
“I think one day you will want to come and see this place. The new city that has grown under the trees is amazing, so vibrant and colourful. There is a real sense of optimism here, despite the climate disaster.”
Suna was moved by Dad’s efforts. She didn’t have any memories of Shanghai, and only very vague memories of her parents. She’d been only two when her family died in the huge flood caused by a super-typhoon. She knew that her mother had been Japanese. She’d been taken to London by her great-grandmother, who had been British Chinese. Granny had died soon after, and that’s how she’d been finally adopted by Dad and Papa. They, and Muir, had become her real family. She knew Dad was right though: she did want to go and see Shanghai, and also Japan. Now that she’d read his letter, she wanted to go there more than ever. And from Dad’s reports, it seemed it would be even quicker and easier than she’d thought. There was so much high-speed rail now, and he would be able to advise her better than anyone else.
Dad had not been able to trace anyone of her Japanese family either. She knew her mother’s parents had been from a small fishing village on Nakadōrijima, one of the Gotō Islands, but that village had long been reclaimed by the sea. Still, she wanted to go to and visit the island. She had often explored the route, and even dreamed of it: the long ferry from Shanghai to Osaka, shinkansen to Nagasaki, and from there to Arikawa, alighting on the pier into steamy heat or subtropical rain.
Suna blinked against the low winter sun. Her eyes were watering from the stinging windblown sand – or maybe she was crying. She wiped her eyes and came back to the reality of the flotsam on the beach. Lit by the pale slanting rays, and drenched by the passing squall, the scene of debris strewn amongst the silver pools was abstracted into a stark monochrome. It actually looked quite beautiful. The figures moving amongst it seemed ethereal, like benign spirits reaping a spectral harvest.
Next: Chapter 6. Spring