Alastair shrugged. “Any country whose ox is gored by the knock-on effects.”
“When I talked to T.R. last week he said ‘some people are gonna be pissed.’ He meant what you mean,” Rufus said. “Countries who run the model like Eshma and look at the results and say, ‘Oh, shit!’”
“Years ago some people ran models to predict the effect of aerosols—sulfur, basically—being injected into the atmosphere from different parts of the world. What happens if we do it from Europe? North America? China? India? The outcomes were surprisingly different. It really matters where you do it. And it then affects each part of the world differently. But if I had to place a bet right here, right now, in this pub, based on what I’ve seen, I’d say it’s going to come down to China versus India.”
Another sonic boom sounded and shut off Alastair’s audio. Rufus signaled as much by sticking his fingers in his ears and looking up into the sky for a few moments.
“I heard you say China versus India.”
“Frequently, in these forecasts, what’s good for one is bad for the other. Monsoons, very important.”
“But you didn’t say who will be on which side. Whose ox is gonna get gored?”
“Ask me in a week. Or—belay that—don’t bother. Watch the news.”
Rufus nodded. He didn’t say what he was thinking, which was that he and the other people living at Flying S Ranch might end up being the news.
BIG FISH
Pippa cut it all together on her laptop during the bus ride back to the nearest volunteer base camp and uploaded it while they were eating their lentil and potato curry. The camp was centered on a little compound of stone walls and stone huts above the lake. Faded signs indicated it had once been a hostel for backpackers and extremely adventuresome Indian motorists. When their bellies were full and their wounds seen to, the Fellowship found an unclaimed patch of ground, kicked rocks out of the way, and just managed to get tents and tarps pitched before darkness fell.
Laks awoke with a need to pee and a fragrance in his nostrils. Which was unusual, for him. Since COVID, most of what he smelled was bad. His doctor had explained to him that COVID damaged the nerve cells in the linings of your nostrils—the ones that intermediated between the olfactory receptors themselves and whatever nerves ran back into your brain. Or something like that. Once the body had defeated the infection, those nerve cells tried to grow back, with varying success depending on how badly they’d been damaged. Sometimes they never grew back at all. Sometimes they got completely better. In between, though, it was like the body was trying to nail down its most survival-relevant capabilities first. And the most important thing your sense of smell could do for you in the way of keeping you alive was to warn you of things that could actually kill you: smoke, gas leaks, rotten meat. And so for some patients those were the smells that came back first. And they got crosswired to the olfactory receptors in crazy ways. So you might put your nose up to a rose or a garlic clove, give it a sniff, but instead smell something dangerous. Laks had never got past that phase. He could smell certain things correctly. Mostly dangerous things. Not so much good things.
What he was smelling right now was a blend of dangerous and good, though. It was definitely smoke. But not the smoke of burning wood or coal, which was what you normally smelled in this part of the world. This smoke had an herbal, almost perfumed aroma.
He was not the first to wake up. He could hear Pippa, Bella, and Sue talking in their tent, quite cheerfully and with outbursts of laughter and of delighted surprise.
It sounded and smelled like someone had re-stoked their little campfire; but where had they obtained that much wood?
Laks extracted himself from his sleeping bag and stumbled out into the Fellowship’s mini-compound to find an officer of the Indian Army sitting there in a low-slung camp chair next to the campfire, which was blazing. He was sipping something hot from a thermos, swiping his finger across a tablet, and somehow—as if he were one of those many-armed Hindu deities—managing, at the same time, to smoke a pipe. He was smoking a pipe. This was a thing Laks had seen in black-and-white movies but this was the first time in his life that he had actually seen a man smoking a real pipe! This, then, was the source of that nice aroma. They must put extra stuff in the tobacco to make it smell good.
The officer looked up over his reading glasses at Laks. Fortunately Laks, anticipating a need to get up in the middle of the night, had slept fully clothed and with his keski on his head.