IF THERE WAS ANYTHING TO BE SAID FOR THE BENEFITS OF GLOBAL WARMING, THIS WAS ONE OF THEM -- IT HAD SURE OPENED UP SOME OPPORTUNITIES FOR FLY FISHING. Take Greenland as a case in point. When Professor Ichiro Sato, the world's foremost expert on the search for ET, was growing up in a concrete rabbit hutch in Tokyo, and the best fishing to be found was looking for tiny zarigani (crayfish) in the local concreted stream, which the kids scooped in little nets in the humid summers -- way back then Sato was young and the world was cool, Greenland was just a heaped up slab of ice and rock. Nothing but ice and Inuit, as remote and forbidding as Hell itself. Sato back then probably didn't know the exact figures, but up to 85 percent of the island's surface used to be covered by ice -- a permanent ice cap up to five kilometres thick, comprising 10 per cent of all the ice in the entire world. Only a relatively narrow coastal strip and scattered nunataks (isolated mountain peaks) were free of the ice, and life was hard and cold. Needless to say, this didn't present hot conditions for fly fishing. Coaxing and hauling seals out of ice holes, that was one possibility, to be sure. Spearing whales another. But Sato preferred the more gentlemanly, cerebal aesthetics of fly-fishing, and didn't go in for Hemmingway-style big game hunting. Maybe it went with his kind of work -- fishing out details of alien communications from the background noise of the universe, the ultimate test of patience. At least fly-fishing gave them the occasional chance to score, the occasional release, and victory. Whereas fishing for alien life in the cosmos -- that could take for centuries, it could take forever, and Sato knew it. So, whenever he had the time, he loved to get away somewhere remote and forget about the universe, and get all connected to the innervs\erse. And by the time of his 65th birthday, Greenland had become one of the hottest places in the whole world to get away from it all. It was the ultimate New World.

Take those aforementioned five-kilometre thick ice caps and turn up the temperature say 6-10 degrees in just 20 years, and you can just imagine the Biblical sized flooding which must result. Deluges -- vast glaciers giving way to magnificent new Amazons and miles of sodden estauries and marshlands. The End of the World as We Knew It! The Inuit started complaining that they couldn't hunt seals on the ice any longer. But these troubles diminished into only small-fry when whole nations of displaced people started turning up on their now ice-free and blooming shores, tribes from Africa fleeing sinking homelands and rich Germans buying summer houses to escape the "heat at home". The Africans and Bangladeshi's and other boat people claimed that since it was molten Greenland ice that had sunk their homelands, the Greenlanders owed them something in return, be it land or a piece of the whale hunt action. The Greenlanders could retort that if the Africans and Asians and Germans hadn't be so keen to take up gasoline consumption and all the other vices of capitalist life, Greenland would never have overheated in the first place. But in the end, the Africans and Asians were the ones with no homes to go to, save the sea (and some floating diasporas were created, to be sure -- some pirate utopias!) -- so in the end, pragmastism won out. The Inuit were forced to open up their country, share it with the outsiders. By Dr Sato's 65th birthday, the population of Greenland stood at 7 million and was rising every day. The Wild North was in full swing, and there was nothing that Dr Sato liked to swing (behind a gold club), than a line of inviting bait into the wild waters of a former Greenlandic glacier!

He's picked a spot outside the old capital Nuuk, the place they called Quassussuaq in Inuit, or Lille Malene in Danish. It was easy to find: just pass the peat house at the road going to the airport just before the large curve on the road, near the new West African shantytown -- stop when you see Sermitsiaq rising triumphant from the fly-humming haze! The best fishing place in the whole of the North Atlantic, that was what Dr Sato used to say! Hydro-electric and outdated fibre-optic cables crossed the horizon, mangled it as ferociously as all those flies. In the foreground, Lake Qallussuaq was simply overflowing with liberated water.

Gerald McCumbie, standing behind his desk, removed his glasses, and on cue, one of the walls instantly covered itself with myriad Chinese characters.

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KIND OF STUNNED BY THESE STRANGE WORDS AND THE EVEN STRANGER MANNER OF THEIR DELIVERY, Croon lifted his eyes to study some of the Chinese characters on the walls. They were flashing all over the place like the signs in Kowloon on a Friday night when you'd eaten bird-nest soup in a skyhigh tower and seduced an Emerald Princess in the process, and the only thing that mattered in the whole world was getting her -- quickly! -- to the nearest skyhigh love hotel. Reality is itself is coming to an end -- what was that all about? Some kind of practical joke -- but McCumbie never joked, and in any case, April 1 was months away. Was it some kind of test? If so, these Chinese characters were the clue.

He looked more closely at the flashing ideograms. It seemed like a visit from old friends. There at the top was "cheung", the character for "undertake". Underneath was the ideogram which represented "heat, fever" and related concepts. Below that was "pai", gold medal, and "yui", island, and the Chinese version of the character which in Japan meant "small, slight". Croon had studied Chinese as a young man in the trade wars of the early 21st century, and picked it up in a matter of months. It was the way he picked up everything --trigger fast! The same with women. Croon had picked up Japanese during a two-month assignment in 2022, and his mission was to infiltrate a dangerous new religious sect.

<<The beauty of Chinese characters>>

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WHICH WAY DO YOU WANT TO GO: SECTION CASSIUS CROON (c)opyright Crunch Millennia 1996-2003.