The Ministry for the Future

Robinson introduces Ganymed, a 1952 sculpture by Hermann Hubacher, in Chapter 9. Rooted in a myth in which the god Zeus comes in the form of an eagle to kidnap the handsome warrior Ganymede to Mt. Olympus to be his cupbearer (or lover, by some accounts), the statue symbolizes how Mary and others see the relationship between people and nature.

In Chapter 9, Mary points at how the moon seems to lay in Ganymede’s hand, “as if he were about to throw it across the sky” (34), to encourage Badim to do more to help the ministry defend nature on behalf of humanity in the future, what she calls a form of “climate justice” (33-34). For Mary, Ganymed represents the ministry’s potential for doing good. That night is likely the moment when Badim conceives of the Children of Kali, however, so that potential is also violent.

Almost 10 years later, Mary sits under the statue, and this time she is attentive to the eagle toward which Ganymede is gesturing and the swans—“[n]ot creatures of this world at all” (252)—swimming in Lake Zurich near the statue. The swans are creatures of this world, in fact, and when Badim asks Mary about the myth from which the sculpture is derived, she admits she was too fascinated with technology that could help address practical problems than stories like the myth of Ganymede.