"Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)V Athena on the PacificFrank considered adding a postscript to Yann Pierzinski’s Form Seven, suggesting that he pursue internal support at Torrey Pines Generique. Then he decided it would be better to work through Derek Gaspar. He could do it in person during the trip he was making to San Diego to prepare for his move back. A week later he was off. On the first flight west he fell asleep watching a DVD. Transfer at Dallas, a good people-watching airport, then up into the air again, and back to sleep. He woke when he felt the plane tilt down. They were still over Arizona, its huge baked landforms flowing by underneath. A part of Frank that had been asleep for much longer than the nap began to wake up too: he was returning to home ground. It was amazing the way things changed when you crossed to the dry side of the ten-inches-of-rain-a-year isobar. Frank put his forehead against the inner window of the plane, looked ahead to the next burnt range coming into view. Thought to himself, I’ll go surfing. The pale umber of the Mojave gave way to Southern California ’s big scrubby coastal mountains. West of those suburbia hove into view, spilling eastward on filled valleys and shaved hilltops: greater San Diego, bigger all the time. He could see bulldozers busy scraping platforms of flat soil for the newest neighborhood. Freeways glittering with their arterial flow. Frank’s plane slowed and drifted down, past the last peaks and over the city proper. Downtown’s cluster of glassy skyscrapers came into view immediately to the left of the plane, seemingly at about the same height. Those buildings had been Frank’s workplace for a time when he was young, and he watched them as he would any old home. He knew exactly which buildings he had climbed; they were etched on his mind. That had been a good year. Disgusted with his advisor, he had taken a leave of absence from graduate school, and after a season of climbing in Yosemite and living at Camp Four, he had run out of money and decided to do something for a living that would require his physical skills and not his intellectual ones. A young person’s mistake, although at least he had not thought he could make his living as a professional climber. But the same skills were needed for the work of skyscraper window maintenance; not just window washing, which he had also done, but repair and replacement. It had been an odd but wonderful thing, going off the roofs of those buildings and descending their sides to clean windows, repair leaking caulk and flashing, replace cracked panes, and so on. The climbing was straightforward, usually involving platforms for convenience; the belays and T-bars and dashboards and other gear had been bombproof. His fellow workers had been a mixed bag, as was always true with climbers—everything from nearly illiterate cowboys to eccentric scholars of Nietzsche or Adam Smith. And the window work itself had been a funny thing, what the Nietzsche scholar had called the apotheosis of kindergarten skills, very satisfying to perform—slicing out old caulk, applying heated caulk, unscrewing and screwing screws and bolts, sticking giant suckers to panes, levering them out and winching them up to the roofs or onto the platforms—and all under the cool onrush of the marine layer, just under clouds all mixed together with bright sun, so that it was warm when it was sunny, cool when it was cloudy, and the whole spread of downtown San Diego there below to entertain him when he wasn’t working. Often he had felt surges of happiness, filling him in moments when he stopped to look around: a rare thing in his life. Eventually the repetition got boring, as it will, and he had moved on, first to go traveling, until the money he had saved was gone; then back into academia again, as a sort of test, in a different lab, with a different advisor, at a different university. Things had gone better there. Eventually he had ended up back at UCSD, back in San Diego—his childhood home, and still the place where he felt most comfortable on this Earth. He actually noticed that feeling as he left the airport terminal’s glassed-in walkway over the street, and hopped down the outdoor escalator to the rental car shuttles. The comfort of a primate on home ground, no doubt—a familiarity in the slant of the light and the shape of the hills, but above all in the air itself, the way it felt on his skin, that combination of temperature, humidity, and salinity that together marked it as particularly San Diegan. It was like putting on familiar old clothes after spending a year in a tux; he was home, and his cells knew it. He got in his rental car (always the same one, it seemed) and drove out of the lot. North on the freeway, crowded but not impossibly so, people zipping along like starlings, following the flocking rules UCSD. Home base. The school in the eucalyptus grove. Quick-witted, sophisticated, scarily powerful—even from inside it, Frank remained impressed by the place. Among other things it was a very effective troop of primates, collaborating to further the welfare of its members. Even after a year in the East Coast’s great hardwood forest, there was something appealing about the campus’s eucalyptus grove—something charming, even soothing. The trees had been planted as a railroad-tie farm, before it was discovered that the wood was unsuitable. Now they formed a kind of mathematically gridded space, within which the architectural mélange of UCSD’s colleges lay scattered, connected by two broad promenades that ran north and south. Frank had arranged an afternoon of appointments. The department had given him the use of an empty office facing the Revelle Plaza; his own was still occupied by a visiting researcher from Berlin. After getting the key from Rosaria, the department secretary, he sat at a dusty desk by a functioning phone, and discussed dissertation progress with his four remaining graduate students. Forty-five minutes each, and aware the whole time that he really wasn’t doing them justice, that it had been their bad luck to get him as their advisor, because of his decision to go to NSF for a year. Well, he would try to make up for it on his return—but not all at once, and certainly not today. The truth was that none of their projects looked that interesting. Sometimes it happened that way. After that there was an hour and a half to go before his meeting with Derek. Parking at UCSD was a nightmare, but he had gotten a pass to a department slot from Rosaria, and Torrey Pines was only a few hundred yards up the road, so he decided to walk. Then, feeling restless, and even a bit jumpy, it occurred to him to take the climbers’ route that he and some friends had devised for a kind of run/climb workout, when they were all living at Revelle; that would nicely occupy the amount of time he had to kill. It involved walking down La Jolla Shores and turning onto La Jolla Farms Road and heading out onto the bluff of land owned by the university—a squarish plateau between two canyons running down to the beach, ending in a steep three-hundred-and-fifty-foot cliff over the sea. This land had been left in its natural state, more or less—there were some old World War Two bunkers melting away on it—and as they had found seven-thousand-year-old graves on it, likely to stay forever protected in the UC Natural Reserve system. A superb prospect and one of Frank’s favorite places on Earth. He had lived on it, sleeping out there every night and using the old gym as his bathroom; he had had romantic encounters out there; and he had often dropped down the steep surfer’s trail that descended to the beach right at Blacks Canyon. When he got to the cliff’s edge he found a sign announcing that the route down was closed due to erosion of the cliff, and it was hard to argue, as the old trail was now a kind of gully down the edge of a sandstone buttress. But he still wanted to do it, and he strolled south along the cliff’s edge, looking out at the Pacific and feeling the onshore wind blow through him. The view was just as mind-boggling as ever, despite the gray cloud layer; as often happened, the clouds seemed to accentuate the great distances to the horizon, the two plates of ocean and sky converging at such a very slight angle toward each other. California, the edge of history—it was a stupid idea, and totally untrue in all senses of the word, except for this physical one, and the reach beyond to a metaphorical landscape: it did appear to be the edge of something. An awesome spot. And the tighter, steeper canyon on the south side of the empty bluff had an alternative trail down that Frank was willing to break the rules and take. No one but a few cronies of his had ever used this one, because the initial drop was a scarily exposed knife-edge of a buttress, the gritty sandstone eroding in the wind to steep gullies on both sides. The drop into the gully to the left was similarly hairy. The trick was to descend fast and boldly and so Frank did that, skidding out as he turned into the gully, and sliding onto his side and down; but against the other wall of the gully he stopped, and was able to hop down after that very quickly and uneventfully. Down to the salt roar of the beach, the surf louder here because of the tall cliff leaping up from the back of the beach. He walked north down the strand, enjoying yet another familiar place. Blacks Beach, the UCSD surfers’ home away from home. The ascent to Torrey Pines Generique reversed the problems of the descent, in that here all the problems were right down on the beach. A hanging gully dripped over a hard sill some forty feet up, and he had to free climb the grit to the right of the green algal spill; then just scramble up that gully, to the clifftop near the hang-glider port. At the top he discovered a sign that declared this climb too had been illegal. Oh well. He had loved it. He felt refreshed, awake for the first time in weeks somehow. This was what it meant to be home. He could brush his hands through his slightly sweaty and seaspray-dampened hair, and walk in and see what happened. Onto the parklike grounds of Torrey Pines Generique, through the newly beefed-up security gates. The place was looking empty, he thought as he entered the main building and walked down its halls to Derek’s office. They had definitely let a lot of people go; several labs he passed stood empty and unused. Frank entered the reception room and greeted Derek’s secretary, Susan, who buzzed him in. Derek got up from his broad desk to shake hands. “Good to see you again, how are you?” “Fine, and you?” “Oh, getting by, getting by.” His office looked the same as the last time Frank had visited: window view of the Pacific; framed copy of Derek’s cover portrait on a “So, what’s new with the great bureaucrats of science?” “They call themselves technocrats, actually.” “Oh I’m sure it’s a big difference.” Derek shook his head. “I never understood why you went out there. I suppose you made good use of your time.” “Yes.” “And now you’re almost back.” “Yes. I’m almost done.” Frank paused. “But look, like I said to you on the phone, I did see something interesting come in from someone who has worked here.” “Right, I looked into it. We could still hire him full-time, I’m pretty sure. He’s on soft money up at Caltech.” “Good. Because I thought it was a very interesting idea.” “So NSF funded it?” “No, the panel wasn’t as impressed as I was. And they might have been right—it was a bit undercooked. But the thing is, if it did work, you could test genes by computer simulation, and identify proteins you wanted, even down to specific ligands, so you could get better attachments to cells in vivo. It would really speed the process. Sharpen it.” Derek regarded him closely. “You know we don’t really have any funds for new people.” “Yeah I know. But this guy is a postdoc, right? And a mathematician. He was only asking NSF for some computer time really. You could hire him full-time for a starter salary, and put him on the case, and it would hardly cost you a thing. I mean, if you can’t afford that…Anyway, it could be interesting.” “What do you mean, ‘interesting’?” “I just told you. Hire him full-time, and get him to sign the usual contract concerning intellectual property rights and all. Really secure those.” “I get that, but ‘interesting’ how?” Frank sighed. “In the sense that it might be the way to solve your targeted delivery problem. If his methods work and you get a patent, then the potential for licensing income might be really considerable. Really.” Derek was silent. He knew that Frank knew the company was nearly on life support. That being the case, Frank would not bother him with trifles, or even with big deals that needed capital and time to get going. He had to be offering a fix of some kind. “Why did he send this grant proposal to NSF?” “Beats me. Maybe he was turned down by one of your guys when he was here. Maybe his advisor at Caltech told him to do it. It doesn’t matter. But have your people working on the delivery problem take a look at it. After you get this guy hired.” “Why don’t you talk to them? Go talk to Leo Mulhouse about this.” “Well…” Frank thought it over. “Okay. I’ll go talk to them and see how things are going. You get this Pierzinski back on board. Call him today. We’ll see what happens from there.” Derek nodded, still not happy. “You know, Frank, what we really need here is you. Like I said before. Things haven’t been the same in the labs since you left. Maybe when you get back here we could rehire you at whatever level UCSD will allow.” “I thought you just said you didn’t have any money for hires.” “Well that’s true, but for you we could try to work something out, right?” “Maybe. But let’s not talk about that now. I need to get out of NSF first, and see what the blind trust has done with my stock. I used to have some options here.” “You sure did. Hell, we could bury you in those, Frank, I’d love to do that.” Giving people options to buy stock cost a company nothing. They were feel-good gestures, unless everything went right with the company and the market; and with NASDAQ having been in the tank for so long, they were not often seen as real compensation anymore. More a kind of speculation. And in fact Frank expressing interest in them had cheered Derek up, as it was a sign of confidence in the future of Torrey Pines Generique. Also a sign of Frank’s interest in taking part in it, on his return. “Do what you can to get some funding to tide you over a bit longer,” Frank suggested as he got up to leave. “Oh I will. I always am.” Outside, Frank sighed. Torrey Pines was looking like a thin reed. But it was his reed, and anything might happen. Derek was good at keeping things afloat. But Sam Houston was a loss. Derek needed Frank there as scientific advisor. Or consultant, given his UCSD position. And if they had Pierzinski under contract, things might work out. By the end of the year the whole Torrey Pines situation might be turned around. And if it all worked out, the potential was there for it to do very well indeed. Frank wandered down to Leo’s lab. It was noticeably lively compared to the rest of the building—people bustling about, the smell of solvents in the air, machines whirring away. Where there’s life there’s hope. Or perhaps they were only like the musicians on the This, however, represented an attempt to bail the ship out. Frank felt encouraged. He went in and exchanged pleasantries with Leo and his people, feeling that it was easy to be friendly and encouraging. This was the guts of the machine, after all. He mentioned that Derek had sent him down to talk about their current situation, and Leo nodded noncommittally and gave him a rundown, truncated but functional. Frank regarded him as he spoke, thinking: Here is a scientist at work in a lab. He is in the optimal scientific space. He has a lab, he has a problem, he’s fully absorbed and going full tilt. He should be happy. But he isn’t happy. He has a tough problem he’s trying to solve, but that’s not it; people always have tough problems in the lab. It was something else. Probably, that he was aware of the company’s situation—of course, he had to be. Probably this was the source of his unease. The musicians feeling the tilt in the deck. In which case there really was a kind of heroism in the way they played on, focused to the end. But for some reason Frank was also faintly annoyed by this. People plugging away in the same old ways, trying to do things according to the plan, even a flawed plan: normal science, in Kuhnian terms, as well as in the more ordinary sense. All so normal, so trusting that the system worked, when obviously the system was both rigged and broken. How could they persevere? How could they be so blinkered, so determined, so dense? Frank slipped his content in. “Maybe if you had a way to test the genes in computer simulations, find your proteins in advance.” Leo looked puzzled. “You’d have to have a, what. A theory of how DNA codes its gene expression functions. At the least.” “Yes.” “That would be nice, but I’m not aware anyone has that.” “No, but if you did…Wasn’t George working on something like that, or one of his temporary guys? Pierzinski?” “Yeah that’s right, Yann was trying some really interesting things. But he left.” “I think Derek is trying to bring him back.” “Good idea.” Then Marta walked into the lab. When she saw Frank she stopped, startled. “Oh hi Marta.” “Hi Frank. I didn’t know you were going to be coming by.” “Neither did I.” “Oh no? Well—” She hesitated, turned. The situation called for her to say something, he felt, something like Good to see you, if she was going to leave so quickly. But she said only, “I’m late, I’ve got to get to work.” And then she was out the door. Only later, when reviewing his actions, did Frank see that he had cut short the talk with Leo—and pretty obviously at that—in order to follow Marta. In the moment itself he simply found himself walking down the hall, catching up to her before he even realized what he was doing. She turned and saw him. “What,” she said sharply, looking at him as if to stop him in his tracks. “Oh hi I was just wondering how you’re doing, I haven’t seen you for a while, I wondered. Are you up for, how about going out and having dinner somewhere and catching up?” She surveyed him. “I don’t think so. I don’t think that would be a good idea. We might as well not even go there. What would be the point.” “I don’t know, I’m interested to know how you’re doing I guess is all.” “Yeah I know, I know what you mean. But sometimes there are things you’re interested in that you can’t really ever get to know anymore, you know?” “Ah yeah.” He pursed his lips, looked at her. She looked good. She was both the strongest and the wildest woman he had ever met. Somehow things between them had gone wrong anyway. Now he looked at her and understood what she was saying. He was never going to be able to know what her life was like these days. He was biased, she was biased; the scanty data would be inescapably flawed. Talking for a couple hours would not make any difference. So it was pointless to try. Would only bring up bad things from the past. Maybe in another ten years. Maybe never. Marta must have seen something of this train of thought in his face, because with an impatient nod she turned and was gone. A few days after Frank dropped by, Leo turned on his computer when he came in to the lab and saw there was an e-mail from Derek. He opened and read it, then the attachment that had come with it. When he was done he printed it all out, and forwarded it to Brian and Marta. When Marta came in about an hour later she had already done some work on it. “Hey Brian,” she called from Leo’s door, “come check this out. Derek has sent us a new paper from that Yann Pierzinski who was here. He was funny. It’s a new version of the stuff he was working on when he was here. That was interesting I thought. If we could get it to find us better matching ligands, you might not need the hydrodynamic pressures to get them to stick in the body.” Brian had come in while she was telling him this, and she pointed to parts of the diagram on Leo’s screen as he caught up. “See what I mean?” Liver cells, endothelial cells—all the cells in the body had receptor ligands that were extremely specific for the ligands on the particular proteins that they needed to obtain from the blood; together they formed something like lock-and-key arrangements, coded by the genes and embodied in the proteins. In effect they were locksmithing at the microscopic level, working with living cells as their material. “Well, yeah. It would be great. If it worked. Maybe crunch them through this program over and over, until you see repeats. If you did…then test the ones with the ligands that fit best and look strongest chemically.” “And Pierzinski is back to work on it with us!” “Is he?” “Yeah, he’s coming back. Derek says in his e-mail that we’ll have him at our disposal.” “Cool.” Leo checked this in the company’s directory. “Yep, here he is. Rehired just this week. Frank Vanderwal came by and mentioned this guy, he must have told Derek about it I bet. He was asking me about it too. Well, Vanderwal should know, this is his field.” “It’s my field too,” Marta said sharply. “Right, of course, I’m just saying Frank might have, you know. Well, let’s ask Yann to look at what we’ve got. If it works…” Brian said, “Sure. It’s worth trying anyway. Pretty interesting.” He Googled Yann, and Leo leaned over his shoulder to look at the list. “Derek obviously wants us to talk to him right away.” “He must have rehired him for us.” “I see that. So let’s get him before he gets busy with something else. A lot of labs could use another biomathematician.” “True, but there aren’t a lot of labs. I think we’ll get him. Look, what do you think Derek means here, ‘write up the possibilities right away.’” “I suppose he wants to get started using the idea to try to secure more funding.” “Shit. Yeah, that’s probably right. Unbelievable. Okay, let’s pass on that for now, and give Yann a call.” Their talk with Yann Pierzinski was indeed interesting. He breezed into the lab just a few days later, as friendly as ever, and happy to be back at Torrey Pines with a permanent job. He was going to be based in George’s math group, he told them, but had already been told by Derek to expect to work a lot with Leo’s lab; so he arrived curious and ready to go. Leo enjoyed seeing him again. Yann still had a tendency to become a speed-talker when excited, and he still canted his head to the side when thinking, as if to flood that half of his brain with blood, in just the kind of “rapid hydrodynamic forcing” that they were trying to get away from in their work (and he tilted it to the right, so was giving the boost to the so-called intuitive side, Leo noted). His algorithm sets were still works in progress, he said, and underdeveloped precisely in the gene grammars that Leo and Marta and Brian needed from him for their work; but all that was okay, because they could help him, and he was there to help them. They could collaborate, and when it came right down to it, Yann was a powerful thinker, and good to have on the case. Leo felt secure in his own lab abilities, devising and running experiments and the like, but when it came to the curious mixture of math, symbolic logic, and computer programming that these biomathematicians dove into—mathematicizing human logic, among other things, and reducing it to mechanical steps that could be scripted into the computers—he was way out of his depth. So Leo was happy to watch Yann sit down and plug his laptop into their desktop. In the days that followed, they tried his algorithms out on the genes of their HDL factory cells, Yann substituting different procedures in the last steps of his operations, then checking what they got in the computer simulations, and selecting some for their dish trials. Pretty soon they found one version of the operation that was consistently good at predicting proteins that matched well with their target cells—making keys for their locks, in effect. “That’s what I’ve been focusing on for the past As they worked, Pierzinski told them some of how he had gotten to that point in his work, following aspects of his advisor’s work at Caltech and the like. Marta and Brian asked him where he had hoped to take it all, in terms of applications. Yann shrugged; not much of anywhere, he told them. He thought the main interest of the operation was what it revealed about the mathematics of codon function. Just finding out more about the mathematics of how genes became organisms. He had not thought much about the implications for clinical or therapeutic applications, though he freely acknowledged they might be there. “It stands to reason that the more you know about this, the more you’ll be able to see what’s going on.” The rest of it was not his field of interest. It was a classic mathematician thing. “But Yann, don’t you see what the applications of this could be?” “I guess. I’m not really interested in pharmacology.” Leo and Brian and Marta stood there staring at him. Despite his earlier stint there, they didn’t know him very well. He seemed normal enough in most ways, aware of the outside world and so on. To an extent. Leo said “Look, let us take you out to lunch. I want to tell you more about what all this could help us with.” The lobbying firm of Branson and Ananda occupied offices off Pennsylvania Avenue, near the intersection of Indiana and C Streets, about halfway between the White House and the Capitol, and overlooking the Marketplace. It was a very nice office. Charlie’s friend Sridar met them at the front door. First he took them in to meet old Branson himself, then led them into a meeting room dominated by a long table under a window that gave a view of early summer leaves on gnarly branches. Sridar got the Khembalis seated, then offered them coffee or tea; they all took tea. Charlie stood near the door, flexing his knees and bobbing mildly about, keeping Joe asleep on his back, ready to make a quick escape if he had to. Drepung spoke for the Khembalis, although Sucandra and Padma also pitched in with questions from time to time. They all consulted with Rudra Cakrin, who asked them a lot of questions in Tibetan. Charlie began to think he had been wrong about the old man understanding English; it was too cumbersome to be a trick, just as Anna had said. All the Khembalis stared intently at Sridar or Charlie whenever they spoke. They made for a very attentive audience. They definitely had a presence. It had gotten to the point where Charlie felt that their Calcutta cottons, maroon vests, and sandals were normal, and that it was the room itself that was rather strange, so smooth and spotlessly gray. Suddenly it looked to him like the inside of a Gymboree crawl space. “So you’ve been a sovereign country since 1960?” Sridar was saying. “The relationship with India is a little more…complicated than that. We have had sovereignty in the sense you suggest since about 1993.” Drepung rehearsed the history of Khembalung, while Sridar asked questions and took notes. “So—fifteen feet above sea level at high tide,” Sridar said at the end of this recital. “Listen, one thing I have to say at the start—we are not going to be able to promise you anything much in the way of results on this global warming thing. That’s been given up on by Congress—” He glanced at Charlie: “Sorry, Charlie. Maybe not so much given up on as swept under the rug.” Charlie glowered despite himself. “Not by Senator Chase or anyone else who’s really paying attention to the world. And we’re still working on it, we’ve got a big bill coming up and—” “Yes yes, of course,” Sridar said, holding up a hand to stop him before he got into rant mode. “You’re doing what you can. But let’s put it this way—there are quite a few members of Congress who think of it as being too late to do anything.” “Better late than never!” Charlie insisted, almost waking Joe. “We understand,” Drepung said to Sridar, after a glance at the old man. “We won’t have any unrealistic expectations of you. We only hope to engage help that is experienced in the procedures used, the usual protocols you see. We ourselves will be responsible for the content of our appeals to the reluctant bodies, trusting you to arrange the meetings with them.” Sridar kept his face blank, but Charlie knew what he was thinking. Sridar said, “We do our best to give our clients all the benefits of our expertise. I’m just reminding you that we are not miracle workers.” The Khembalis nodded. “The miracles will be our department,” Drepung said, face as blank as Sridar’s. Charlie thought, these two jokers might get along fine. Slowly they worked out what they would expect from one another, and Sridar wrote down the details of an agreement. The Khembalis were happy to have him write up what in essence was their request for a proposal. “That sure makes it easier,” Sridar remarked. “A clever way to make me write you a fair deal.” During this part of the negotiation (for such it was) Joe finished waking up, so Charlie left them to it. Later that day Sridar gave Charlie a call. Charlie was sitting on a bench in Dupont Circle, feeding Joe a bottle and watching two of the local chess hustlers practice on each other. They played too fast for Charlie to follow the game. “Look, Charlie, this is a bit ingrown, since you put me in touch with these guys, but really it’s your man that the lamas ought to be meeting first, or at least early on. The Foreign Relations Committee is one of the main ones we’ll have to work on, so it all begins with Chase. Can you set us up with a good chunk of the senator’s quality time?” “I can with some lead time,” Charlie said, glancing at Phil’s master calendar on his wrist screen. “How about next Thursday, he’s had a cancellation?” “Is that late morning, so he’s at his best?” “He’s always at his best.” “Yeah right.” “No I’m serious. You don’t know Phil.” “I’ll take your word for it. Thursday at?…” “Ten to ten-twenty.” “Perfect.” Charlie could have made a good case for the energy of Senator Phil Chase being more or less invariant, and always very high. Here in the latter part of his third term he had fully settled into Washington, and his seniority was such that he had become very powerful, and very busy. He was constantly on the go, with every hour from six A.M. to midnight scheduled in twenty-minute units. It was hard to understand how he could keep his easy demeanor and relaxed ways. Almost too relaxed. He did not sweat the details on most topics. He was a delegating senator, a hands-off senator. As many of the best of them were. Some senators tried to learn everything, and burned out; others knew almost nothing, and were in effect living campaign posters. Phil was somewhere in the middle. He used his staff well—as an exterior memory bank, if nothing else, but often for much more—for advice, for policy, even occasionally for their accumulated wisdom. His longevity in office, and the strict code of succession that both parties obeyed, had now landed him the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and a seat on Environment and Public Works. These were A-list committees, and the stakes were high. The Democrats had come out of the recent election with a one-vote advantage in the Senate, a two-vote disadvantage in the House, and the President was still a Republican. This was in the ongoing American tradition of electing as close to a perfect gridlock of power in Washington as possible, presumably in the hope that nothing further would happen and history would freeze for good. An impossible quest, like building a card house in a gale, but it made for tight politics and good theater. Inside the Beltway it was considered to be an invigorating thing. In any case, Phil was now very busy with important matters, and heading toward re-election time himself. His old chief of staff Wade Norton was on the road now, and though Phil valued Wade’s advice and kept him on staff as a telecommuting general advisor, Andrea had taken over the executive staff duties, and Charlie the environmental research, though he too was a part-timer, and telecommuting much of the time. When he did make it in, he found operations in the office fully professional, but with a chaotic edge that he had long ago concluded was mostly engendered by Phil himself. Phil would seize the minutes he had between appointments and wander from room to room, looking to needle people. At first this appeared to be wasting time, but Charlie had come to believe it was a kind of quick polling method, Phil squeezing in impressions and reactions in the little time he had that was not scheduled. “We’re surfing the big picture today!” he would exclaim as he wandered the offices, or stood by the refrigerator drinking another ginger ale. Those were the moments when he would start arguments for the hell of it. His staff loved it. Congressional staffers were by definition policy wonks; many had joined their high school debate clubs of their own free will. Talking shop with Phil was right up their alley. And his enthusiasm was infectious, his grin like a double shot of espresso. He had one of those smiles that invariably looked as if he was genuinely delighted. If it was directed at you, you felt a glow inside. In fact Charlie was convinced that it was Phil’s smile that had gotten him elected the first time, and maybe every time since. What made it so beautiful was that it wasn’t faked. He didn’t smile if he didn’t feel like it. But he often felt like it. That was very revealing, and so Phil had his effect. With Wade gone, Charlie was now his chief advisor on global climate issues. Actually Charlie and Wade functioned as a sort of tag-team telecommuting advisor, both of them part-time, Charlie calling in every day, dropping by every week; Wade calling in every week, and dropping by every month. It worked because Phil didn’t always need them for help when environmental issues came up. “You guys have educated me,” he would tell them. “I can take this on my own. Naturally I’ll be doing what you told me to do anyway. So don’t worry, stay at the South Pole, stay in Bethesda. I’ll let you know how it went.” That would have been fine with Charlie, if only Phil had in fact always done what Charlie and Wade advised. But Phil had other advisors as well, and pressures from many directions; and he had his own opinions. So there were divergences. He would grin his infectious grin whenever he crossed Charlie. It seemed to give him special pleasure. “There are more things in heaven and earth,” he would murmur, only half-listening to Charlie’s remonstrances. Like most congresspeople, he thought he knew better than his staff how best to get things done; and because he got to vote and his staff didn’t, in effect he was right. On the following Thursday at ten A.M., when the Khembalis had their twenty minutes head-to-head with Phil, Charlie was very interested to see how it would go, but that morning he had to attend a Washington Press Club appearance by a scientist from the Heritage Foundation who was claiming rapidly rising temperatures would be good for agriculture. Marking such people and assisting in the immediate destruction of their pseudoarguments was important work, which Charlie undertook with a fierce indignation; at some point the manipulation of facts became a kind of vast lie, and this was what Charlie felt when he had to confront people like Strengloft: he was combating liars, people who lied about science for money, thus obscuring the clear signs of the destruction of their present world. So that they would end up passing on to all the children a degraded planet, devoid of animals and forests and coral reefs and all the other aspects of a biological support system and home. Liars, cheating their own children, and the many generations to come: this is what Charlie wanted to shout at them, as vehemently as any street-corner nutcase preacher. So that when he went at them, with his tightly polite questions and pointed remarks, there was a certain edge to him. Opponents tried to deflect it by labeling it as self-righteousness or affluent hypocrisy or whatnot; but the edge could still cut if he hit the right spots. In any case it was perhaps best that Charlie not be there at Phil’s meeting with the Khembalis, so that Phil would not be distracted, or feel that Charlie was somehow coaching the visitors. Phil could form his own impressions, and Sridar would be there to do any shepherding necessary. By now Charlie had seen enough of the Khembalis to trust that Rudra Cakrin and his gang would be up to the task of representing themselves. Phil would experience their weird persuasiveness, and he knew enough of the world not to discount them just because they were not Beltway operators dressed in suit and tie. So Charlie hustled back from the predictably irritating hearing, and arrived right at 10:20. He hurried up the stairs to Phil’s offices on the third floor. These offices had a great view down the Mall—the best any senator had, obtained in a typical Phil coup. The Senate, excessively cramped in the old Russell, Dirksen, and Hart buildings, had finally bitten the bullet and taken by eminent domain the headquarters of the United Brothers of Carpenters and Joiners of America, who had owned a fine building in a spectacular location on the Mall, between the National Gallery and the Capitol itself. The carpenters’ union had howled at the takeover, of course—only a Republican House and Senate would have dared to do it, happy as they were to smack a union whenever possible—but it had left a political stink such that very few senators were actually willing to brave the negative PR of moving into the new acquisition once all the legal wrangling was over and the building was theirs. Phil, however, had been quite happy to move in, claiming he would represent the carpenters’ and all the other unions so faithfully that it would be as if they had never left the building. “Where better to defend the working people of America?” he had asked, smiling his famous smile. “I’ll keep a hammer on the windowsill to remind myself who I’m representing.” At 10:23 A.M., Phil ushered the Khembalis out of his corner office, chatting with them cheerfully. “Yes, thanks, of course, I’d love to—talk to Evelyn about setting up a time.” The Khembalis looked pleased. Sridar looked impassive but faintly amused, as he often did. Just as he was leaving, Phil spotted Charlie and stopped. “Charlie! Good to see you at last!” Grinning hugely, he came back and shook his blushing staffer’s hand. “So you laughed in the President’s face!” He turned to the Khembalis: “This man burst out laughing in the President’s face! I’ve always wanted to do that!” The Khembalis nodded neutrally. “So what did it feel like?” Phil asked Charlie. “And how did it go over?” Charlie, still blushing, said, “Well, it felt involuntary, to tell the truth. Like a sneeze. Joe was really tickling me. And as far as I could tell, it went over okay. The President looked pleased. He was trying to make me laugh, so when I did, he laughed too.” “Yeah I bet, because he had you.” “Well, yes. Anyway he laughed, and then Joe woke up and we had to get a bottle in him before the Secret Service guys did something rash.” Phil laughed, then shook his head, growing more serious. “Well, it’s too bad, I guess. But what could you do. You were ambushed. He loves to do that. Hopefully it won’t cost us. It might even help. —But look I’m late, I’ve got to go. You hang in there.” And he put a hand to Charlie’s arm, said good-bye again to the Khembalis, and hustled out the door. The Khembalis gathered around Charlie, looking cheerful. “Where is Joe? How is it he is not with you?” “I really couldn’t bring him to this thing I was at, so my friend Asta from Gymboree is looking after him. Actually I have to get back to him soon,” checking his watch. “But come on, tell me how it went.” They all followed Charlie into his cubicle by the stairwell, stuffing it with their maroon robes (they had dressed formally for Phil, Charlie noted) and their strong brown faces. They still looked pleased. “Well?” Charlie said. “It went very well,” Drepung said, and nodded happily. “He asked us many questions about Khembalung. He visited Khembalung seven years ago, and met Padma and others at that time. He was very interested, very…sympathetic. He reminded me of Mr. Clinton in that sense.” Apparently the ex-President had also visited Khembalung a few years previously, and had made a big impression. “And, best of all, he told us he would help us.” “He did? That’s great! What did he say, exactly?” Drepung squinted, remembering: “He said—‘I’ll see what I can do.’” Sucandra and Padma nodded, confirming this. “Those were his exact words?” Charlie asked. “Yes. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’” Charlie and Sridar exchanged a glance. Which one was going to tell them? Sridar said carefully, “Those were indeed his exact words,” thus passing the ball to Charlie. Charlie sighed. “What’s wrong?” Drepung asked. “Well…” Charlie glanced at Sridar again. “Tell them,” Sridar said. Charlie said, “What you have to understand is that no congressperson likes to say no.” “No?” “No. They don’t.” “They never say no,” Sridar amplified. “Never?” “Never.” “They like to say yes,” Charlie explained. “People come to them, asking for things—favors, votes—consideration of one thing or another. When they say yes, people go away happy. Everyone is happy.” “Constituents,” Sridar expanded. “Which mean votes, which means their job. They say yes and it means votes. Sometimes one yes can mean fifty thousand votes. So they just keep saying yes.” “That’s true,” Charlie admitted. “Some say yes no matter what they really mean. Others, like our Senator Chase, are more honest.” “Without, however, ever actually saying no,” Sridar added. “In effect they only answer the questions they can say yes to. The others they avoid in one way or another.” “Right,” Drepung said. “But he said…” “He said, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’” Drepung frowned. “So that means no?” “Well, you know, in circumstances where they can’t get out of answering the question in some other way—” “Yes!” Sridar interrupted. “It means no.” “Well…” Charlie tried to temporize. “Come on, Charlie.” Sridar shook his head. “You know it’s true. It’s true for all of them. ‘Yes’ means ‘maybe’; ‘I’ll see what I can do’ means ‘no.’ It means ‘not a chance.’ It means, ‘I can’t believe you’re asking me this question, but since you are, this is how I will say no.’” “He will not help us?” Drepung asked. “He will if he sees a way that will work,” Charlie declared. “I’ll keep on him about it.” Drepung said, “You’ll see what you can do.” “Yes—but I mean that, really.” Sridar smiled sardonically at Charlie’s discomfiture. “And Phil’s the most environmentally aware senator of all, isn’t that right Charlie?” “Well, yeah. That’s definitely true.” The Khembalis pondered this. |
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