Kim Stanley Robinson Forty Signs of Rain

I The Buddha Arrives

The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight. A fierce inundation of photons—on average, 342 joules per second per square meter. 4185 joules (one calorie) will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. If all this energy were captured by the Earth’s atmosphere, its temperature would rise by ten degrees Celsius in one day.

Luckily much of it radiates back to space. How much depends on albedo and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, both of which vary over time.

A good portion of Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, is created by its polar ice caps. If polar ice and snow were to shrink significantly, more solar energy would stay on Earth. Sunlight would penetrate oceans previously covered by ice, and warm the water. This would add heat and melt more ice, in a positive feedback loop.

The Arctic Ocean ice pack reflects back out to space a few percent of the total annual solar energy budget. When the Arctic ice pack was first measured by nuclear submarines in the 1950’s, it averaged thirty feet thick in midwinter. By the end of the century it was down to fifteen. Then one August the ice broke up into large tabular bergs, drifting on the currents, colliding and separating, leaving broad lanes of water open to the continuous polar summer sunlight. The next year the breakup started in July, and at times more than half the surface of the Arctic Ocean was open water. The third year, the breakup began in May.

That was last year.

Weekdays always begin the same. The alarm goes off and you are startled out of dreams that you immediately forget. Predawn light in a dim room. Stagger into a hot shower and try to wake up all the way. Feel the scalding hot water on the back of your neck, ah, the best part of the day, already passing with the inexorable clock. Fragment of a dream, you were deep in some problem set now escaping you, just as you tried to escape it in the dream. Duck down the halls of memory—gone. Dreams don’t want to be remembered.

Evaluate the night’s sleep. Anna Quibler decided the previous night had not been so good. She was exhausted already. Joe had cried twice, and though it was Charlie who had gotten up to reassure him, as part of their behavioral conditioning plan which was intended to convey to Joe that he would never again get Mom to visit him at night, Anna had of course woken up too, and vaguely heard Charlie’s reassurances: “Hey. Joe. What’s up. Go back to sleep, buddy, it’s the middle of the night here. Nothing gets to happen until morning, so you might as well. This is pointless this wailing, why do you do this, good night damn it.”

A brusque bedside manner at best, but that was part of the plan. After that she had tossed and turned for long minutes, trying heroically not to think of work. In years past she had recited in her head Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven,” which she had memorized in high school and which had a nice soporific effect, but then one night she had thought to herself, “Quoth the raven, ‘Livermore,’” because of work troubles she was having with some people out at Lawrence Livermore. After that the poem was ruined as a sleep aid because the moment she even thought of “The Raven” she thought about work. In general Anna’s thoughts had a tropism toward work issues.

Shower over, alas. She dried and dressed in three minutes. Downstairs she filled a lunch box for her older boy. Nick liked and indeed insisted that his lunch be exactly the same every day, so it was no great trouble to assemble it. Peanut butter sandwich, five carrots, apple, chocolate milk, yogurt, roll of lunch meat, cheese stick, cookie. Two minutes for that, then throw in a freeze pack to keep it chilled. As she got the coldpacks out of the freezer she saw the neat rows of plastic bottles full of her frozen milk, there for Charlie to thaw and feed to Joe during the day when she was gone. That reminded her, not that she would have forgotten much longer given how full her breasts felt, that she had to nurse the bairn before she left. She clumped back upstairs and lifted Joe out of his crib, sat on the couch beside it. “Hey love, time for some sleepy nurses.”

Joe was used to this, and glommed onto her while still almost entirely asleep. With his eyes closed he looked like an angel. He was getting bigger but she could still cradle him in her arms and watch him curl into her like a new infant. Closer to two than one now, and a regular bruiser, a wild man who wearied her; but not now. The warm sensation of being suckled put her body back to sleep, but a part of her mind was already at work, and so she detached him and shifted him around to the other breast for four more minutes. In his first months she had had to pinch his nostrils together to get him to come off, but now a tap on the nose would do it, for the first breast at least. On the second one he was more recalcitrant. She watched the second hand on the big clock in his room sweep up and around. When they were done he would go back to sleep and snooze happily until about nine, Charlie said.

She hefted him back into his crib, buttoned up and kissed all her boys lightly on the head. Charlie mumbled “Call me, be careful.” Then she was down the stairs and out the door, her big work bag over her shoulder.

The cool air on her face and wet hair woke her fully for the first time that day. It was May now and the late spring mornings had only a little bit of chill left to them, a delicious sensation given the humid heat that was to come. Fat gray clouds rolled just over the buildings lining Wisconsin Avenue. Truck traffic roared south. Splashes of dawn sunlight struck the metallic blue sheen of the windows on the skyscrapers up at Bethesda Metro, and as Anna walked briskly along it occurred to her, not for the first time, that this was one of the high points of her day. There were some disturbing implications in that fact, but she banished those and enjoyed the feel of the air and the tumble of the clouds over the city.

She passed the Metro elevator kiosk to extend her walk by fifty yards, then turned and clumped down the little stairs to the bus stop. Then down the big stairs of the escalator, into the dimness of the great tube of ribbed concrete that was the underground station. Card into the turnstile, thwack as the triangular barriers disappeared into the unit, pull her card out and through to the escalator down to the tracks. No train there, none coming immediately (you could hear them and feel their wind long before the lights set into the platform began to flash) so there was no need to hurry. She sat on a concrete bench that positioned her such that she could walk straight into the car that would let her out at Metro Center directly in the place closest to the escalators down to the Orange Line East.

At this hour she was probably going to find an open seat on the train when it arrived, so she opened her laptop and began to study one of the jackets, as they still called them: the grant proposals that the National Science Foundation received at a rate of fifty thousand a year. “Mathematical and Algorithmic Analysis of Palindromic Codons as Predictors of a Gene’s Protein Expression.” The project hoped to develop an algorithm that had shown some success in predicting which proteins any given gene sequence in human DNA would express. As genes expressed a huge variety of proteins, by unknown ways and with variations that were not understood, this kind of predicting operation would be a very useful thing if it could be done. Anna was dubious, but genomics was not her field. It would be one to give to Frank Vanderwal. She noted it as such and queued it in a forward to him, then opened the next jacket.

The arrival of a train, the getting on and finding of a seat, the change of trains at Metro Center, the getting off at the Ballston stop in Arlington, Virginia: all were actions accomplished without conscious thought, as she read or pondered the proposals she had in her laptop. The first one still struck her as the most interesting of the morning’s bunch. She would be interested to hear what Frank made of it.

Coming up out of a Metro station is about the same everywhere: up a long escalator, toward an oval of gray sky and the heat of the day. Emerge abruptly into a busy urban scene.

The Ballston stop’s distinction was that the escalator topped out in a big vestibule leading to the multiple glass doors of a building. Anna entered this building without glancing around, went to the nice little open-walled shop selling better-than-usual pastries and packaged sandwiches, and bought a lunch to eat at her desk. Then she went back outside to make her usual stop at the Starbucks facing the street.

This particular Starbucks was graced by a staff maniacally devoted to speed and precision; they went at their work like a drum and bugle corps. Anna loved to see it. She liked efficiency anywhere she found it, and more so as she grew older. That a group of young people could turn what was potentially a very boring job into a kind of strenuous athletic performance struck her as admirable and heartening. Now it cheered her once again to move rapidly forward in the long queue, and see the woman at the computer look up at her when she was still two back in line and call out to her teammates, “Tall latte half-caf, nonfat, no foam!” and then, when Anna got to the front of the line, ask her if she wanted anything else today. It was easy to smile as she shook her head.

Then outside again, doubled paper coffee cup in hand, to the NSF building’s west entrance. Inside she showed her badge to security in the hall, then crossed the atrium to get to the south elevators.

Anna liked the NSF building’s interior. The structure was hollow, featuring a gigantic central atrium, an octagonal space that extended from the floor to the skylight, twelve stories above. This empty space, as big as some buildings all by itself, was walled by the interior windows of all the NSF offices. Its upper part was occupied by a large hanging mobile, made of metal curved bars painted in primary colors. The ground floor was occupied by various small businesses facing the atrium—pizza place, hair stylist, travel agency, bank outlet.

A disturbance caught Anna’s eye. At the far door to the atrium there was a flurry of maroon, a flash of brass, and then suddenly a resonant low chord sounded, filling the big space with a vibrating blaaa, as if the atrium itself were a kind of huge horn.

A bunch of Tibetans, it looked like, were now marching into the atrium: men and women wearing belted maroon robes and yellow winged conical caps. Some played long straight antique horns, others thumped drums or swung censers around, dispensing clouds of sandalwood. It was as if a parade entry had wandered in from the street by mistake. They crossed the atrium chanting, skip-stepping, swirling, all in majestic slow motion.

They headed for the travel agency, and for a second Anna wondered if they had come in to book a flight home. But then she saw that the travel agency’s windows were empty.

This gave her a momentary pang, because these windows had always been filled by bright posters of tropical beaches and European castles, changing monthly like calendar photos, and Anna had often stood before them while eating her lunch, traveling mentally within them as a kind of replacement for the real travel that she and Charlie had given up when Nick was born. Sometimes it had occurred to her that given the kinds of political and bacterial violence that were often behind the scenes in those photos, mental travel was perhaps the best kind.

But now the windows were empty, the small room behind them likewise. In the doorway the Tibetanesque performers were now massing, in a crescendo of chant and brassy brass, the incredibly low notes vibrating the air almost visibly, like the cartoon soundtrack bassoon in Fantasia.

Anna moved closer, dismissing her small regret for the loss of the travel agency. New occupants, fogging the air with incense, chanting or blowing their hearts out: it was interesting.

In the midst of the celebrants stood an old man, his brown face a maze of deep wrinkles. He smiled, and Anna saw that the wrinkles mapped a lifetime of smiling that smile. He raised his right hand, and the music came to a ragged end in a hyperbass note that fluttered Anna’s stomach.

The old man stepped free of the group and bowed to the four walls of the atrium, his hands held together before him. He dipped his chin and sang, his chant as low as any of the horns, and split into two notes, with a resonant head tone distinctly audible over the deep clear bass, all very surprising coming out of such a slight man. Singing thus, he walked to the doorway of the travel agency and there touched the doorjambs on each side, exclaiming something sharp each time.

“Rig yal ba! Chos min gon pa!”

The others all exclaimed “Jetsun Gyatso!”

The old man bowed to them.

And then they all cried “Om!” and filed into the little office space, the brassmen angling their long horns to make it in the door.

A young monk came back out. He took a small rectangular card from the loose sleeve of his robe, pulled some protective backing from sticky strips on the back of the card, and affixed it carefully to the window next to the door. Then he retreated inside.

Anna approached the window. The little sign said

An embassy! And a country she had never heard of, not that that was particularly surprising, new countries were popping up all the time, they were one of the UN’s favorite dispute-settlement strategies. Perhaps a deal had been cut in some troubled part of Asia, and this Khembalung created as a result.

But no matter where they were from, this was a strange place for an embassy. It was very far from Massachusetts Avenue’s ambassadorial stretch of unlikely architecture, unfamiliar flags, and expensive landscaping; far from Georgetown, Dupont Circle, Adams-Morgan, Foggy Bottom, East Capitol Hill, or any of the other likely haunts for locating a respectable embassy. Not just Arlington, but the NSF building no less!

Maybe it was a scientific country.

Pleased at the thought, pleased to have something new in the building, Anna approached closer still. She tried to read some small print she saw at the bottom of the new sign.

The young man who had put out the sign reappeared. He had a round face, a shaved head, and a quick little mouth, like Betty Boop’s. His expressive black eyes met hers directly.

“Can I help you?” he said, in what sounded to her like an Indian accent.

“Yes,” Anna said. “I saw your arrival ceremony, and I was just curious. I was wondering where you all come from.”

“Thank you for your interest,” the youth said politely, ducking his head and smiling. “We are from Khembalung.”

“Yes, I saw that, but…”

“Ah. Our country is an island nation. We are living in the Bay of Bengal, near the mouth of the Ganges.”

“I see,” Anna said, surprised; she had thought they would be from somewhere in the Himalayas. “I hadn’t heard of it.”

“It is not a big island. Nation status has been a recent development, you could say. Only now are we establishing a representation.”

“Good idea. Although, to tell the truth, I’m surprised to see an embassy in here. I didn’t think of this as being the right kind of space.”

“We chose it very carefully,” the young monk said.

They regarded each other.

“Well,” Anna said, “very interesting. Good luck moving in. I’m glad you’re here.”

“Thank you.” Again he nodded.

Anna did the same and took her leave.

But as she turned to go, something caused her to look back. The young monk still stood there in the doorway, looking across at the pizza place, his face marked by a tiny grimace of distress.

Anna recognized the expression at once. When her older son Nick was born she had stayed home with him, and those first several months of his life were a kind of blur to her. She had missed her work, and doing it from home had not been possible. By the time maternity leave was over they had clearly needed her at the office, and so she had started working again, sharing the care of Nick with Charlie and some baby-sitters, and eventually a day-care center in a building in Bethesda, near the Metro stop. At first Nick had cried furiously whenever she left for any reason, which she found excruciating; but then he had seemed to get used to it. And so did she, adjusting as everyone must to the small pains of the daily departure. It was just the way it was.

Then one day she had taken Nick down to the day-care center—it was the routine by then—and he didn’t cry when she said good-bye, didn’t even seem to care or to notice. But for some reason she had paused to look back into the window of the place, and there on his face she saw a look of unhappy, stoical determination—determination not to cry, determination to get through another long lonely boring day—a look which on the face of a toddler was simply heartbreaking. It had pierced her like an arrow. She had cried out involuntarily, even started to rush back inside to take him in her arms and comfort him. Then she reconsidered how another good-bye would affect him, and with a horrible wrenching feeling, a sort of despair at all the world, she had left.

Now here was that very same look again, on the face of this young man. Anna stopped in her tracks, feeling again that stab from five years before. Who knew what had caused these people to come halfway around the world? Who knew what they had left behind?

She walked back over to him.

He saw her coming, composed his features. “Yes?”

“If you want,” she said, “later on, when it’s convenient, I could show you some of the good lunch spots in this neighborhood. I’ve worked here a long time.”

“Why, thank you,” he said. “That would be most kind.”

“Is there a particular day that would be good?”

“Well—we will be getting hungry today,” he said, and smiled. He had a sweet smile, not unlike Nick’s.

She smiled too, feeling pleased. “I’ll come back down at one o’clock and take you to a good one then, if you like.”

“That would be most welcome. Very kind.”

She nodded. “At one, then,” already recalibrating her work schedule for the day. The boxed sandwich could be stored in her office’s little refrigerator.

Anna completed her journey to the south elevators. Waiting there she was joined by Frank Vanderwal. They greeted each other, and she said, “Hey I’ve got an interesting jacket for you.”

He mock-rolled his eyes. “Is there any such thing for a burnt-out case like me?”

“Oh I think so.” She gestured back at the atrium. “Did you see our new neighbor? We lost the travel agency but gained an embassy, from a little country in Asia.”

“An embassy, here?”

“I’m not sure they know much about Washington.”

“I see.” Frank grinned his crooked grin, a completely different thing than the young monk’s sweet smile, sardonic and knowing. “Ambassadors from Shangri-La, eh?” One of the UP arrows lit, and the elevator door next to it opened. “Well, we can use them.”

Primates in elevators. People stood in silence looking up at the lit numbers on the display console, as per custom.

Again the experience caused Frank Vanderwal to contemplate the nature of their species, in his usual sociobiologist’s mode. They were mammals, social primates: a kind of hairless chimp. Their bodies, brains, minds, and societies had grown to their current state in East Africa over a period of about two million years, while the climate was shifting in such a way that forest cover was giving way to open savannah.

Much was explained by this. Naturally they were distressed to be trapped in a small moving box. No savannah experience could be compared to it. The closest analog might have been crawling into a cave, no doubt behind a shaman carrying a torch, everyone filled with great awe and very possibly under the influence of psychotropic drugs and religious rituals. An earthquake during such a visit to the underworld would be about all the savannah mind could contrive as an explanation for a modern trip in an elevator car. No wonder an uneasy silence reigned; they were in the presence of the sacred. And the last five thousand years of civilization had not been anywhere near enough time for any evolutionary adaptations to alter these mental reactions. They were still only good at the things they had been good at on the savannah.

Anna Quibler broke the taboo on speech, as people would when all the fellow passengers were cohorts. She said to Frank, continuing her story, “I went over and introduced myself. They’re from an island country in the Bay of Bengal.”

“Did they say why they rented the space here?”

“They said they had picked it very carefully.”

“Using what criteria?”

“I didn’t ask. On the face of it, you’d have to say proximity to NSF, wouldn’t you?”

Frank snorted. “That’s like the joke about the starlet and the Hollywood writer, isn’t it?”

Anna wrinkled her nose at this, surprising Frank; although she was proper, she was not prudish. Then he got it: her disapproval was not at the joke, but at the idea that these new arrivals would be that hapless. She said, “I think they’re more together than that. I think they’ll be interesting to have here.”

Homo sapiens is a species that exhibits sexual dimorphism. And it’s more than a matter of bodies; the archaeological record seemed to Frank to support the notion that the social roles of the two sexes had deviated early on. These differing roles could have led to differing thought processes, such that it would be possible to characterize plausibly the existence of unlike approaches even to ostensibly non-gender-differentiated activities, such as science. So that there could be a male practice of science and a female practice of science, in other words, and these could be substantially different activities.

These thoughts flitted through Frank’s mind as their elevator ride ended and he and Anna walked down the hall around to their offices. Anna was as tall as he was, with a nice figure, but the dimorphism differentiating them extended to their habits of mind and their scientific practice, and that might explain why he was a bit uncomfortable with her. Not that this was a full characterization of his attitude. But she did science in a way that he found annoying. It was not a matter of her being warm and fuzzy, as you might expect from the usual characterizations of feminine thought—on the contrary, Anna’s scientific work (she still often coauthored papers in statistics, despite her bureaucratic load) often displayed a finicky perfectionism that made her a very meticulous scientist, a first-rate statistician—smart, quick, competent in a range of fields and really excellent in more than one. As good a scientist as one could find for the rather odd job of running the Bioinformatics Division at NSF, good almost to the point of exaggeration—too precise, too interrogatory—it kept her from pursuing a course of action with drive. Then again, at NSF maybe that was an advantage.

In any case she was so intense about it. A kind of Puritan of science, rational to an extreme. And yet of course at the same time that was all such a front, as with the early Puritans; the hyperrational coexisted in her with all the emotional openness, intensity, and variability that was the American female interactional paradigm and social role. Every female scientist was therefore potentially a kind of Mr. Spock, the rational side foregrounded and emphasized while the emotional side was denied, and the two coexisting at odds with one another.

On the other hand, judged on that basis, Frank had to admit that Anna seemed less split-natured than many women scientists he had known. Pretty well integrated, really. He had spent many hours of the past year working with her, engaged in interesting discussions in the pursuit of their shared work. No, he liked her. The discomfort came not from any of her irritating habits, not even the nit-picking or hairsplitting that made her so strikingly eponymous (though no one dared joke about that to her), habits that she couldn’t seem to help and didn’t seem to notice—no—it was more the way her hyperscientific attitude combined with her passionate female expressiveness to suggest a complete science, or even a complete humanity. It reminded Frank of himself.

Not of the social self that he allowed others to see, admittedly; but of his internal life as he alone experienced it. He too was stuffed with extreme aspects of both rationality and emotionality. This was what made him uncomfortable: Anna was too much like him. She reminded him of things about himself he did not want to think about. But he was helpless to stop his trains of thought. That was one of his problems.

Halfway around the circumference of the sixth floor, they came to their offices. Frank’s was one of a number of cubicles carving up a larger space; Anna’s was a true office right across from his cubicle, a room of her own, with a foyer for her secretary Aleesha. Both their spaces, and all the others in the maze of crannies and rooms, were filled with the computers, tables, file cabinets, and crammed bookshelves that one found in scientific offices everywhere. The decor was standard degree-zero beige for everything, indicating the purity of science.

In this case it was all rendered human, and even handsome, by the omnipresent big windows on the interior sides of the rooms, allowing everyone to look across the central atrium and into all the other offices. This combination of open space and the sight of fifty to a hundred other humans made each office a slice or echo of the savannah. The occupants were correspondingly more comfortable at the primate level. Frank did not suffer the illusion that anyone had consciously planned this effect, but he admired the instinctive grasp on the architect’s part of what would get the best work out of the building’s occupants.

He sat down at his desk. He had angled his computer screen away from the window so that when necessary he could focus on it, but now he sat in his chair and gazed out across the atrium. He was near the end of his yearlong stay at NSF, and the workload, while never receding, was simply becoming less and less important to him. Piles of articles and hard-copy jackets lay in stacks on every horizontal surface, arranged in Frank’s complex throughput system. He had a lot of work to do. Instead he looked out the window.

The colorful mobile filling the upper half of the atrium was a painfully simple thing, basic shapes in primary colors, very like a kindergartner’s scribble. Frank’s many activities included rock climbing, and often he had occupied his mind by imagining the moves he would need to make to climb the mobile. There were some hard sections, but it would make for a fun route.

Past the mobile, he could see into one hundred and eight other rooms (he had counted). In them people typed at screens, talked in couples or on the phone, read, or sat in seminar rooms around paper-strewn tables, looking at slide shows, or talking. Mostly talking. If the interior of the National Science Foundation were all you had to go on, you would have to conclude that doing science consisted mostly of sitting around in rooms talking.

This was not even close to true, and it was one of the reasons Frank was bored. The real action of science took place in laboratories, and anywhere else experiments were being conducted. What happened here was different, a kind of metascience, one might say, which coordinated scientific activities, or connected them to other human action, or funded them. Something like that; he was having trouble characterizing it, actually.

The smell of Anna’s Starbucks latte wafted in from her office next door, and he could hear her on the phone already. She too did a lot of talking on the phone. “I don’t know, I have no idea what the other sample sizes are like… No, not statistically insignificant, that would mean the numbers were smaller than the margin of error. What you’re talking about is just statistically meaningless. Sure, ask him, good idea.”

Meanwhile Aleesha, her assistant, was on her phone as well, patiently explaining something in her rich D.C. contralto. Unraveling some misunderstanding. It was an obvious if seldom acknowledged fact that much of NSF’s daily business was accomplished by a cadre of African-American women from the local area, women who often seemed decidedly unconvinced of the earth-shattering importance that their mostly Caucasian employers attributed to the work. Aleesha, for instance, displayed the most skeptical politeness Frank had ever seen; he often tried to emulate it, but without, he feared, much success.

Anna appeared in the doorway, tapping on the doorjamb as she always did, to pretend that his space was an office. “Frank, I forwarded a jacket to you, one about an algorithm.”

“Let’s see if it arrived.” He hit CHECK MAIL, and up came a new one from [email protected]. He loved that address. “It’s here, I’ll take a look at it.”

“Thanks.” She turned, then stopped. “Hey listen, when are you due to go back to UCSD?”

“End of July or end of August.”

“Well, I’ll be sorry to see you go. I know it’s nice out there, but we’d love it if you’d consider putting in a second year, or even think about staying permanently, if you like it. Of course you must have a lot of irons in the fire.”

“Yes,” Frank said noncommittally. Staying longer than his one-year stint was completely out of the question. “That’s nice of you to ask. I’ve enjoyed it, but I should probably get back home. I’ll think about it, though.”

“Thanks. It would be good to have you here.”

Much of the work at NSF was done by visiting scientists, who came on leave from their home institutions to run NSF programs in their area of expertise for periods of a year or two. The grant proposals came pouring in by the thousands, and program directors like Frank read them, sorted them, convened panels of outside experts, and ran the meetings in which these experts rated batches of proposals in particular fields. This was a major manifestation of the peer-review process, a process Frank thoroughly approved of—in principle. But a year of it was enough.

Anna had been watching him, and now she said, “I suppose it is a bit of a rat race.”

“Well, no more than anywhere else. In fact if I were home it’d probably be worse.”

They laughed.

“And you have your journal work too.”

“That’s right.” Frank waved at the piles of typescripts: three stacks for Review of Bioinformatics, two for The Journal of Sociobiology. “Always behind. Luckily the other editors are better at keeping up.”

Anna nodded. Editing a journal was a privilege and an honor, even though usually unpaid—indeed, one often had to continue to subscribe to a journal just to get copies of what one had edited. It was another of science’s many noncompensated activities, part of its extensive economy of social credit.

“Okay,” Anna said. “I just wanted to see if we could tempt you. That’s how we do it, you know. When visitors come through who are particularly good, we try to hold on to them.”

“Yes, of course.” Frank nodded uncomfortably. Touched despite himself; he valued her opinion. He rolled his chair toward his screen as if to get to work, and she turned and left.

He clicked to the jacket Anna had forwarded. Immediately he recognized one of the investigators’ names.

“Hey Anna?” he called out.

“Yes?” She reappeared in the doorway.

“I know one of the guys on this jacket. The P.I. is a guy from Caltech, but the real work is by one of his students.”

“Yes?” This was a typical situation, a younger scientist using the prestige of his or her advisor to advance a project.

“Well, I know the student. I was the outside member on his dissertation committee, a few years ago.”

“That wouldn’t be enough to be a conflict.”

Frank nodded as he read on. “But he’s also been working on a temporary contract at Torrey Pines Generique, which is a company in San Diego that I helped start.”

“Ah. Do you still have any financial stake in it?”

“No. Well, my stocks are in a blind trust for the year I’m here, so I can’t be positive, but I don’t think so.”

“But you’re not on the board, or a consultant?”

“No no. And it looks like his contract there was due to be over about now anyway.”

“That’s fine, then. Go for it.”

No part of the scientific community could afford to be too picky about conflicts of interest. If they were, they’d never find anyone free to peer-review anything; hyperspecialization made every field so small that within them, everyone seemed to know everyone. Because of that, so long as there were no current financial or institutional ties with a person, it was considered okay to proceed to evaluate their work in the various peer-review systems.

But Frank had wanted to make sure. Yann Pierzinski had been a very sharp young biomathematician—he was one of those doctoral students whom one watched with the near certainty that one would hear from them again later in their career. Now here he was, with something Frank was particularly interested in.

“Okay,” he said now to Anna. “I’ll put it in the hopper.” He closed the file and turned as if to check out something else.

After Anna was gone, he pulled the jacket back up. “Mathematical and Algorithmic Analysis of Palindromic Codons as Predictors of a Gene’s Protein Expression.” A proposal to fund continuing work on an algorithm for predicting which proteins any given gene would express.

Very interesting. This was an assault on one of the fundamental mysteries, an unknown step in biology that presented a considerable blockage to any robust biotechnology. The three billion base pairs of the human genome encoded along their way some hundred thousand genes; and most of these genes contained instructions for the assembly of one or more proteins, the basic building blocks of organic chemistry and life itself. But which genes expressed which proteins, and how exactly they did it, and why certain genes would create more than one protein, or different proteins in different circumstances—all these matters were very poorly understood, or completely mysterious. This ignorance made much of biotechnology an endless and very expensive matter of trial and error. A key to any part of the mystery could be very valuable.

Frank scrolled down the pages of the application with practiced speed. Yann Pierzinski, Ph.D. in biomath, Caltech. Still doing postdoc work with his thesis advisor there, a man Frank had come to consider a bit of a credit hog, if not worse. It was interesting, then, that Pierzinski had gone down to Torrey Pines to work on a temporary contract, for a bioinformatics researcher whom Frank didn’t know. Perhaps that had been a bid to escape the advisor. But now he was back.

Frank dug into the substantive part of the proposal. The algorithm set was one Pierzinski had been working on even back in his dissertation. Chemical mechanics of protein creation as a sort of natural algorithm, in effect. Frank considered the idea, operation by operation. This was his real expertise; this was what had interested him from childhood, when the puzzles solved had been simple ciphers. He had always loved this work, and now perhaps more than ever, offering as it did a complete escape from consciousness of himself. Why he might want to make that escape remained moot; howsoever it might be, when he came back he felt refreshed, as if finally he had been in a good place.

He also liked to see patterns emerge from the apparent randomness of the world. This was why he had recently taken such an interest in sociobiology; he had hoped there might be algorithms to be found there which would crack the code of human behavior. So far that quest had not been very satisfactory, mostly because so little in human behavior was susceptible to a controlled experiment, so no theory could even be tested. That was a shame. He badly wanted some clarification in that realm.

At the level of the four chemicals of the genome, however—in the long dance of cytosine, adenine, guanine, and thymine—much more seemed to be amenable to mathematical explanation and experiment, with results that could be conveyed to other scientists, and put to use. One could test Pierzinski’s ideas, in other words, and find out if they worked.

He came out of this trance of thought hungry, and with a full bladder. He felt quite sure there was some real potential in the work. And that was giving him some ideas.

He got up stiffly, went to the bathroom, came back. It was midafternoon already. If he left soon he would be able to hack through the traffic to his apartment, eat quickly, then go out to Great Falls. By then the day’s blanching heat would have started to subside, and the river’s gorge walls would be nearly empty of climbers. He could climb until well past sunset, and do some more thinking about this algorithm, out where he thought best these days, on the hard old schist walls of the only place in the Washington D.C. area where a scrap of nature had survived.