"Fifty Degrees Below" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)IX. LEAP BEFORE YOU LOOK“Kun chok sum? “Kun chok sum!” The Khembali house stayed very busy. With a significant percentage of Khembalung’s population cycling through it, occupying every closet and stairwell while waiting for openings in other refugia being established, the place jumped with a sense of crammed life that to Frank often felt surreal. Sometimes it was so obvious that a whole town had moved into a single house, as in some reality TV show. Sometimes as he sat in the corner of the big kitchen, peeling potatoes or drying dishes, he would look at all the industrious faces, cheerful or harried as they might be, and think: This is almost entertaining. Other times the tumult would get to him and his train of thought would leave the room and return to the forest in his mind. It was dark in that particular parcellation, dark and quiet, no, not quiet—the sound of the wind in the trees was always there—but solitary. The leaves and the stars and the creek were peaceful company. “People are so crazy,” he would say to Rudra Cakrin at the end of the night as he sprawled on his mattress. “Ha ha.” Some nights he stayed late at work, working on the list or talking on the phone to a contact Diane had in Moscow, a Dmitri, who worked in the Kremlin’s environmental resources ministry. Late at night in D.C. it was midday in Moscow, and Frank could call and try to find out more about the Russians’ carbon capture plans. Dmitri’s English was excellent. He claimed that no decisions had been made about interventions of any kind. They were very happy to see the North Atlantic project under way. After these conversations Frank sometimes just slept there on his couch, as he had planned to back at the beginning. It was entirely comfortable, but Frank found he missed his conversations with Rudra Cakrin. There was no other part of the day that held as many surprises for him. Even talking to Diane or Dmitri wasn’t as surprising, and the two Ds were getting pretty surprising. Sometimes Frank found himself a little bit jealous; she and Dmitri were old friends, and Frank could hear Diane’s voice take on the quality it had when she was talking to someone close to her; also the tone of one great power speaking to another. Dmitri had carte blanche to experiment with one-sixth of the land surface of the Earth. That was power; there were bound to be surprises there. Even so, Rudra was more surprising. One night Frank was lying on his groundpad in the light of the dimmed laptop, trying to tell Rudra about the impact the old man’s lecture at NSF had had on him. When he asked about the particular sentence that had acted on him like a sort of catalyst—“An excess of reason is itself a form of madness”—Rudra snorted. “Milarepa say that because his guru beat him all the time, and always a good reason for it. So Milarepa never think much of reason. But that is an easy thing to notice. And hardly anyone ever reason anyway.” “Yes, I’ve noticed that.” Frank described to the old man what had happened to him subsequent to the lecture containing that remark, explaining what he could of his ideas about zen koans or paradigm busters, and how they caused actual physical changes in the brain, leading to new systems of parcellation that reorganized both unconscious thought and the way consciousness perceived the world. “Then on the way to the Quiblers I got stuck with a woman in an elevator, I’ll tell you about that some other time…” “Maybe,” Frank said, googling the word, some kind of female Tantric spirit, “anyway it convinced me that I had to stay in DC, and yet I had put a resignation letter in Diane’s in-box that was kind of harsh. So I decided I had to get it out, and the only way to do it was to break into the building through the skylight and go into her office through the window.” “Good idea,” Rudra said. For the first time it occurred to Frank that when Rudra said this he might not always mean it. An ironic oracle: another surprise. Another time Rudra knocked his water glass over and said “ “Yes. Name of founder of Karma Kagyu sect.” “So, like saying Christ or something.” “Yes.” “You Buddhists are pretty mellow with the curses, I guess that makes sense. It’s all like Heavens to Betsy!” Rudra grinned. “ “What’s that one.” “Eat shit.” “Whoah, okay then! Pretty good.” “What about you, what you say?” “Oh, we say cat shit also, although it’s pretty harsh. Then, like ‘God damn you’ or whatever…” “Means maker of universe? Condemn to hellworld?” “Yeah, I guess that’s right.” “Pretty harsh!” “Yes,” laughing, “and that’s one of the mild ones.” Another night, shockingly warm, the house stuffy and murmurous, creaking under the weight of its load, Frank complained, “Couldn’t we move out to the garden shed or something?” “Garden shed?” Rudra said, holding up his hands to make a box. “Yes, the little building out back. Maybe we could move out there.” “I like that.” Frank was surprised again. “It would be cold.” “Cold,” Rudra said scornfully. “No “Well. Maybe not for you. Or else you haven’t been outside lately at night. It was as cold as I’ve ever felt it, back in February.” “Cold,” Rudra said, dismissing the idea. “Test for oracle, to see if Dorje truly visits him, one spends night naked by river with many wet sheets. Wear sheets through the night, see how many one can dry.” “Your body heat would dry out a wet sheet?” “Seven in one night.” “Okay, well, let’s ask about the shed then. Spring is here, and I need to move outdoors.” “Good idea.” Frank added that to his list of The shed was dilapidated in the extreme. It stood in the back corner of the lot under a big tree, and the leaf fall had destroyed the shingles. Frank swept off some of the mulch and tarped over the roof, with a promise to it to make proper repairs in the summer. Inside its one room they moved two old single beds, a bridge table with a lamp, two chairs, and a space heater. Immediately Frank felt better. “Nice to lose things,” Rudra commented. Frank quoted the Emersonfortheday: “One is rich in proportion to the things one doesn’t need.” “We seem to be getting very rich.” The Khembalis’ vegetable garden lay outside their door in the backyard. It was obsessively tended, even in winter, and now that spring was here the black soil mounding up in long rows from the pale mulch was dotted everywhere by new greens. Immaculately espaliered branches of dwarf fruit trees were dotted with lime-green points and no longer looked dead. If there was any sun at all during the day the garden would be filled with elderly Khembalis sitting on the ground, weeding and gossiping. Frank joined Rudra and this group for a couple of hours on Sunday mornings, puttering about in the usual gardening way. Rudra spoke to the others in quick Tibetan, not trying to keep Frank in the conversation. Frank had his Tibetan primer, and was still trying to learn, but the language’s origins were not Indo-European, and it seemed to Frank a very alien system, hard to pronounce, and employing endings that sounded alike in the same way the letters of the alphabet looked alike. To compound his difficulties, Khembali was an eastern dialect of Tibetan, with some important differences in pronunciation that had never been written down. It made for slow going. Mostly they reverted to English. The lengthening days got fuller, impossible though that seemed. In the mornings Frank went to Optimodal, then to work; ran with the lunch runners when he could get away, then back to work; in the evenings over to the park for a frisbee run, passing the bros and catching a brief burst of their rambunctious ass-holery; then to a restaurant, often an impulse stop; and back to the house, to help where he could, usually the final cleanup in the kitchen. By the time he went out to the shed and Rudra, he was almost asleep. Rudra was usually sitting up in bed, back against the headboard. Sometimes he seemed to be daydreaming, others observant, even if only looking at the candle. He seemed attentive to the quality of Frank’s silences. Sometimes he watched Frank without actually listening to him. Frank found that unnerving—although sometimes, when he quit talking and sat on his bed, reading or tapping away at his laptop, he became aware of a feeling that seemed in the room rather than in himself, of peacefulness and calm. It emanated from the old man. Rudra would watch him, or space out, perhaps humming to himself, perhaps emit a few bass notes with their head tones buzzing in a harmonic fifth. Meditation, Rudra said once when asked about them. What might meditation be said to be doing? Could one disengage awareness, or rather the active train of consciousness, always spinning out its string of sentences? Leaving only awareness? Without falling asleep? And what then was the mind doing? Was the deep thinking in the unconscious actually continuing to cogitate in its own hidden way, or did it too calm? Memories, dreams, reflections? Was there someone in there below the radar, walking the halls of the parcellated mind and choosing which room to enter, going in and considering the contents of that parcellation, and its relation to all the rest? God he hoped so. It was either that or else he was zoning through his days in a haze of indecision. It could be that too. He was almost asleep one night when his cell phone beeped, and he roused to answer it, knowing it was her. “Frank it’s me.” “Hi.” His heart was pounding. The sound of her voice had the effect of cardiac paddles slapped to his chest. The sensation was actually kind of frightening. “Can you meet?” “Yeah sure.” “I know you’re in Arlington now. How about the Lincoln Memorial, in an hour?” “Sure.” “Not on the front steps. Around the back, between it and the river.” “Isn’t that still fenced off?” “South of that, then. South of the bridge then, on the new levee path.” “Okay.” “Okay see you.” Rudra turned out to have been sitting up in the gloom. Now he was looking at Frank as if he’d understood every word, as why not; it had not been a complicated conversation. Frank said, “I’m going out.” “Yes.” “I’ll be back later.” “Back later.” Then, as Frank was leaving: “Good luck!” The banks of the Potomac between the Watergate and the Tidal Basin had been rebuilt with a broad levee just in from the river, topped by a path running under a double row of cherry trees. The Corps of Engineers had displayed their usual bravura style, and the new cherry trees were enormous. Under them at night Frank felt dwarfed, and the entire scene took on a kind of pharaonic monumentalism, as if he had been transported to some vast religious site on the banks of the Nile. He stopped to look over the water to Theodore Roosevelt Island, where during the great flood he had seen Caroline in a boat, motoring upstream. That vision stood like a watermark in his mind, overlaying all his memories of the inundated city. He had never remembered to ask her what she had been doing that afternoon. She had stood alone at the wheel, looking straight ahead. Sometimes life became so dreamlike, things felt heraldic or archetypal, etched since the beginning of time so that one could only perform actions that already existed. Ah God, these meetings with Caroline made him feel so strange, so alive and somehow more-than-alive. He would have to ask Rudra about the nature of that feeling, if he could find some way to convey it. See if there was a Buddhist mental realm it corresponded to. There in the trees below stood the Korean War Memorial. Caroline emerged from these trees, saw him on the levee and waved. She hurried up the next set of broad shallow steps, and there under the cherry trees they embraced. She hugged him hard. Her body felt tense, and out here in the open he felt apprehensive himself. “Let’s go back to my van,” he suggested. “It’s too open here.” “No,” she said, “your van chip is on active record now.” “So they know I’m here?” “It’s being recorded, is a better way to put it. There’s comprehensive coverage in D.C. now. So they know where you drive. But they don’t know I’m here.” “Are you sure?” “Yes. As sure as I can be.” She shivered. He held her by the arm. “You’re not chipped?” “No. I don’t think so. Neither of us are.” She took a wand from her pocket, checked them both. No clicks. They walked under the cherry trees, dark overhead against the city’s night cloud. There were a few solitaries out, mostly runners, then another couple, possibly trysting like Frank and Caroline. “How can you stand it?” Frank said. “How does anybody stand it? We’re all chipped.” “But most people no one wants to trace.” “I don’t know. The banks want to know. That means most people.” She shrugged; it happened to everyone, that’s just the way things were now. Best not to want privacy. But now, under the cherry trees, they were alone. No cars, no chips, phones left in their cars. They were off the net. No one else in the world knew where they were at that moment. It was somewhat like being in their little bubble universe of passion. A walking version of that union. Frank felt her upper arm press against his, felt the flushing in all his skin, the quickened pulse. It must be love, he thought. Even with Marta it had never been like this. Or was it perhaps just the element of danger that seemed to envelop her? Or the mysterious nature of that danger? They sat on one of the benches overlooking the Tidal Basin. For a while they kissed. The feeling that poured through Frank then had less to do with their caresses, ravishing as they were, than with the sense of sharing a feeling; the opening up to one another, the vulnerability of giving and receiving. Very possibly, Frank thought in one of their hard silent hugs, their histories had caused them both to want this feeling of commitment more than anything else. After all the bad that had happened, a way to be with someone, to let down one’s guard, to inhabit a shared space… Them against the world. Or outside the world. Maybe she was like him in this: that she needed a partner. He could not be certain. But it felt like it. She curled against him. Frank warmed to her manner, her physical grace, her affection. It was different with her, it just was. But she wasn’t free. Her situation was compromised, even scary. She was breaking promises both personal and professional. That in itself didn’t bother Frank as perhaps it should have, because she was doing it for him, and because of him; so how could he fault her for it? Especially since she also made him feel that somehow he deserved these moves, that she liked him for real reasons. That she was right to do what she was doing, because of the way he was to her. Reciprocity: hard to believe; but there she was, in his arms. The world seeped back. A distant streetlight winked on the breeze. “You’re staying with those friends again?” She nodded into his shoulder. Her body felt like she was falling asleep. He found this very moving; he could not remember the last time a woman had fallen asleep in his arms. He thought: maybe this is what it would be like. You would only ever know by doing it. “Hey gal. What if one of your friends wakes up in the night?” “I leave a note on the couch, saying that I couldn’t sleep and went for a run.” “Ah.” It was interesting to think of friends who would believe that, and what it said about her. “But I should start back in a while.” “Damn.” She sighed. “We need to talk.” “Good.” “Tell me—do you think elections matter?” “What? Well, sure. I mean, what do you mean?” “I mean, do you think they really matter?” “Hmmm,” Frank said. “Because I’m not sure they do. I think they’re just a kind of theater, you know, designed to distract people from how things are really decided.” “You sound like some of my colleagues at work.” “I’m being very scientific, I’m sure.” Her smile was brief and perfunctory. “You know this futures market I’m supervising?” “Sure. What, are they betting on the election now?” “Of course, but you can do that anywhere. What my group is betting on has more to do with potential side-effects of the election. Or, now I’m thinking it’s more like causes.” “What do you mean?” “There are people who can have an influence on the results.” “How do you mean?” “Like, a group involved with voting-machine technology.” “Uh oh. You mean like tweaking them somehow?” “Exactly.” “So your futures market is now going bullish on certain people involved with voting technology?” “That’s right. And not only that, but some of those people are my husband and his colleagues.” “He’s not doing what you’re doing?” “Not anymore. He’s moved again, and his new job is part of this stuff. This group may even be the originators of it.” “A government agency working on fixing elections? How can that be?” “That’s the way it’s evolved. The voting system is vulnerable to tampering, so there are agencies trying to figure out every way it can happen, so they can counter them. They pass that up the chain to be used, and then one of the more politicized agencies takes that information and makes sure it gets into the right hands at the right time. And there you have it.” “You sound like it’s happened already before?” “I think the Cleland Senate loss in Georgia looks very suspicious.” “How come that isn’t a huge scandal?” “The best evidence is in a classified study. Meanwhile, since it’s been a rumor, it’s treated like all the other rumors, many of which are wrong. So actually, to have the idea of something broached without any subsequent repercussion is actually a kind of, what. A kind of inoculation for an event you don’t want investigated.” “Jesus. So how does it work, do you know?” “Not the technical details, no. I know they target certain counties in swing states. They use various statistical models and decision-tree algorithms to pick which ones, and how much to intervene.” “I’d like to see this algorithm.” “Yes, I thought you might.” She reached into her purse, pulled out a data disk in a paper sleeve. She handed it to him. “This is it.” “Whoah,” Frank said, staring at it. “And so … What should I do with it?” “I thought you might have some friends at NSF who might be able to put it to use.” “Shit. I don’t know.” She watched him take it in. “Do you think it matters?” she asked again. “What, who wins the election, or whether there’s cheating?” “Both. Either.” “Well. I should think election fraud is always bad.” “I suppose.” “How could it not be?” “I don’t know. It’s seems like it’s been mostly cheating for a while now. Or theater at best. Distracting people from where the decisions are really made.” “But something like this would be more than theater.” “So you think it does matter.” “Well… yeah.” Frank was a little shocked that she would even wonder about it. “It’s the law. I mean, the rule of law. Lawful practice.” “I suppose so.” She shrugged. “I mean, here I am giving this to you, so I must think so too. So, well—can you help fix it?” He hefted the CD in its sleeve. “Fix the fix?” “Yes.” “I’d like to, sure. I don’t know if I can.” “It’d be a matter of programming I guess. Reprogramming.” “Some kind of reverse transcription.” “Sounds good. I can’t do it. I can see what’s happening, but I can’t do anything about it.” “You know but can’t act.” “Yeah that’s right.” “But you did this. So I’ll see what I can do, sure. There must be an activation code tucked in the normal voting technology. There’s any number of ways to do that. So … maybe it could be tweaked, to disable it. I do have a friend at NSF who does encryption, now that I think of it, and he worked at DARPA. He’s a mathematician, he might be able to help. Does your futures market list him? Edgardo Alfonso?” “I don’t know. I’ll look.” “What about anyone else at NSF?” “Yeah sure. Lots of NSF people. Diane Chang’s stock is pretty high right now, for that matter.” “Is that right?” “Yes.” She watched him think it over. Finally he shrugged. “Maybe saving the world is profitable.” “Or maybe it’s unprofitable.” “Hmmmmm. Listen, if you could get me a list of everyone listed in my market, that would be great. If Edgardo isn’t on the list, all the better.” “I’ll check. He would be discreet?” “Yes. He’s a friend, I trust him. And to tell the truth, he would greatly enjoy hearing about this.” She laughed, surprised. “He likes bad news?” “Very much.” “He must be a happy guy these days.” “Yes.” “Okay. But don’t tell too many people about this. Please.” “No. And the ones I tell won’t need to know how I’ve gotten this, either.” “Good.” “But they may need to be able to get back in to this program.” “Sure, I know. I’ve been thinking about that. It’ll be hard to do without anyone knowing it’s been done.” She scowled. “In fact I can’t think of a good way. “Listen, Caroline,” he said, spooked by the look on her face. “I hope you aren’t taking any chances here!” She frowned. “What do you think this is? I told you. He’s strange.” “Shit.” He hugged her hard. After a while she shrugged in his grasp. “Let’s just do this and see what we see. I’m as clean as I can be. I don’t think he has any idea what I’ve been up to. I’ve made it look like I’m chipped twenty-four seven and that I’m not doing anything. I can only really get offline at night, when he expects me to be sleeping. I leave the whole kit in the bed and then I can do what I need to. Otherwise if I dropped the kit it would show something was wrong. So, you know. So far so good.” “No one suspects you of anything?” “Not of anything more than marital alienation. There are some friends who know about that, sure. But that’s been going on for years. No. People have no idea.” “Even if they’re in the business of having that kind of idea?” “No. They think they know it all. They think I’m just… But it’s gone so far past what they can know. Don’t you understand—the technical capacity has expanded so fast, no one’s really grasped the full potential of it yet.” “Maybe they have. You seem to have.” “But no one’s listening to me.” “But there could be others like you.” “True. That may be happening too. There are superblacks now that are essentially flying free. But hopefully we won’t run into anyone like that trying to stop us on this. Hopefully they think they’re completely superblack still.” “Hmmm.” Counterintelligence, wasn’t that what it was called? Surely that would be standard. Unless you thought you were an innermost sanctum, the smallest and newest box in the nesting boxes, with no one aware even of your existence. If her husband was in something like that, and thought his secrets were entirely safe from an estranged wife who did nothing more than sullenly perform her midlevel tech job… They sat side by side in an uneasy silence. Around them the city pulsed and whirred in its dreams. Such a diurnal species; here they were, surrounded by three million people, but all of them conked like zombies, leaving them in the night alone. She nudged into his shoulder. “I should go.” “Okay.” They kissed briefly. Frank felt a wave of desire, then fear. “You’ll call?” “I’ll call. I’ll call your Khembali embassy.” “Okay good. Don’t be too long.” “I won’t. I never have.” “That’s true.” Although not quite. They got up and hugged. He watched her walk off. When he couldn’t see her anymore he walked back up the levee path. A runner passed going the other way, wearing orange reflective gloves. After that Frank was alone in the vast riverine landscape. The view up the Mall toward the Capitol was as of some stupendous temple’s formal garden. The smell of Caroline’s hair was still in his nostrils, preternaturally clear and distinct. He was afraid for her. Frank drove back to NSF and slept in his van, or tried to. Upstairs early the next morning, feeling stunned and unhappy, he looked at the disk Caroline had given him. Clearly he had to do something with it. He was afraid to put it in his computers. Who knew what it would trigger, or wreak, or report to. He could put them in a public computer. He could turn off his laptop’s airport transmitter permanently. He could buy a cheap laptop and never airport it at all. He could … He went for a run with Edgardo and Kenzo and Bob. When they got to the narrow path that ran alongside Route 66, he tailed behind with Edgardo, and then slowed a little, and then saw that Kenzo and Bob were talking about some matter of their own, in the usual way of this stretch. He said, “Edgardo, do you think the election matters?” “What, the presidential election?” “Yes.” Edgardo laughed, prancing for a few strides to express his joy fully. “Frank, you amaze me! What a good question.” “But you know what I mean.” “No, not at all. Do you mean, will it make a difference which of these candidates takes office? Or do you mean are elections in general a farce?” “Both.” “Oh, well. I think Chase would do better than the president on climate.” “Yes.” “But elections in general? Maybe they don’t matter. But let’s say they are good, sure. Good soap opera, but also they are symbols, and symbolic action is still action. We need the illusion they give us, that we understand things and have some control. I mean, in Argentina, when elections went away, you really noticed how different things felt. As if the law had gone. Which it had. No, elections are good. It’s voters who are bad.” Frank said, “That’s interesting. I mean—if “You must be very easily reassured.” “Maybe I am. I wouldn’t have thought so.” “You’re lucky if you are. But—why do you need reassurance?” “I’ve got a disk back in my office that I’d kind of like to show you. But I’m afraid it might be dangerous.” “Dangerous to the election?” “Yes. Exactly.” “Oh ho.” Edgardo ran on a few strides. “May I ask who gave it to you?” “I can’t tell you that. A friend in another agency.” “Ah ha! Frank, I am surprised at you. But this town is so full of spooks, I guess you can’t avoid them. The first rule when you meet one is to run away, however.” Edgardo considered it. “Well, I could put it in a laptop I have.” “You wouldn’t mind?” “That’s what it’s for.” “Do you still have contacts with people at DARPA?” “Sort of.” He shook his head. “My cohort there has scattered by now. That might not be where I would go to get help anyway. You could never be sure if they weren’t the source of your problem in the first place. Do you know what the disk has on it?” Frank told him what Caroline had said about the plan to fix the election. As he spoke he felt the oddity of the information coming out of his mouth, and Edgardo glanced at him from time to time, but mostly he ran on nodding as if to confirm what Frank was saying. “Does this sound familiar?” Frank asked. “You’re not looking too shocked.” “No. It’s been a real possibility for some time now Assuming that it hasn’t already happened a time or two.” “Aren’t there any safeguards? Ways of checking for accuracy, or making a proper recount if they need to?” “There are. But neither are foolproof, of course.” “How can that be?” “That’s just the way the technology works. That’s the system Congress has chosen to use. Convenient, eh?” “So you think there could be interventions?” “Sure. I’ve heard of programs that identify close races as they’re being tallied, close ones but just outside the margin of error, so there aren’t any automatic recounts to gum up the works… Embed a tweak that reverses a certain percentage of votes, you know, just enough to change the result.” “Might you be able to counter one of these, if you saw it in advance? Some kind of reverse transcription that would neutralize the tweak without tipping off the people deploying it?” “Me?” “Or people you know.” “Let me look at what you have. If it looks like it might be what you think, then I’ll pass it along to some friends of mine.” “Thanks, Edgardo.” “But here we come to the bike path, let’s change the subject. Give me what you’ve got, and I’ll see what I can do. But give it to me at Food Factory, at three, and let’s not talk about this in the building.” “No,” Frank said, interested to see how Edgardo appeared to assume that the building might be compromised. So the surveillance was real after all. Of course he had known that; Caroline had told him. But it was interesting to get data from a different source. Back at work, showered and in his office, checking the clock frequently and then setting his alarm for three so he didn’t forget, Frank saw in an e-mail from Diane that Yann Pierzinski was on the first list for the expanded Grants for Exploratory Research program. He smiled, but then frowned. The new climate studies institute in San Diego had been approved, and the old Torrey Pines Generique facility rented to house it; and Leo Mulhouse had even been hired to run a genetic engineering lab. It all added up to good news, which of course he ought to call and share with Marta. For a while he found other more pressing things on his list of She greeted him coolly, and he hacked his way through the preliminaries until her lack of cooperation forced him to the point. “I got it arranged like you asked, I mean I couldn’t stay in it directly because of conflict of interest, but it was such a good idea that they did it on their own. There’s to be a new federal science and tech center, focused on climate interventions and housed in Torrey Pine Generique’s old labs. And Yann and your whole team down there is listed for a big Grant for Exploratory Research too. So now you can go back to San Diego.” “I can go wherever I want,” she said. “I don’t need your permission or your help.” “No, that isn’t what I meant.” “Uh huh. Don’t be trying to buy me off, Frank.” “I’m not. I mean, I owe you that money, but you wouldn’t take it. Anyway this is just a good thing. Yann and you guys get one of the grants, and this will be one of the best research labs anywhere for what you guys are up to.” “We already have a lab.” “Small Delivery is too small to deliver.” “Not so, actually. We’ve just gotten a contract from the Russian government. We’re licensing the genome for our altered tree lichen to them, and we’ll be helping them to manufacture and distribute it in Siberia and Kamchatka this fall.” “But—wow. Have you had any field trials for this lichen?” “This is the field trial.” “What? How big an area?” “Lichen propagate by wind dispersion.” “That’s what I thought! Have the Russians talked to us or the UN or anyone?” “The president believes it’s an internal matter.” “But the wind blows from Russia to Alaska.” “No doubt.” “And so to Canada.” “Sure. The spruce forest wraps the whole world at that latitude,” Marta agreed. “Our lichen could eventually spread through all of it.” “And what’s the estimated maximum takedown from that, do you suppose?” “Eleanor thinks maybe a hundred parts per million.” “Holy shit!” “I know, it’s a lot. But we figure there’s no way to cause an ice age now, because we can always put carbon back into the atmosphere if we need to. This drawdown at max would only take us most of the way back to before the Industrial Revolution anyway, so the models we run show it will be a good thing, no matter if the takedown goes to one hundred percent of the estimate or not. Or even if it draws down more.” “I don’t know how you can say that!” “That’s what our models show.” “Any idea how fast the propagation will go?” “It kind of depends on how we distribute it in the first place.” “Jesus, Marta. So the Russians are just “Yes. The president thinks it’s too important to risk sharing the decision with the rest of the world. Democracy could hang up their best chance of a rescue, he apparently said. They now think that global warming is more of a disaster for them than for anyone else. At first they thought it might warm them up and make for better agriculture, but now their models are predicting drought, and cold more severe than ever, so they’re bummed.” “Everyone’s bummed,” Frank said. “Yeah but Russia is actually doing something about it. So quit trying to buy me off, Frank. We’re going to be doing fine on our own. We’ve got some performance components in our contract that look good.” Villas are cheap in Odessa, Frank didn’t say. “The new center hired Leo Mulhouse to run a bio lab,” he said instead. “Ah ha! Well. That’s good.” She didn’t want to give him any credit. No matter what you do you’ll still be an asshole, her silence said. “Okay, well. He’ll be good. See you Frank.” “Bye Marta.” The moment he got off he called Diane, and had to leave a message, but right at the end of the day she called back. He told her what Marta had said, and she was just as surprised as Frank had been, he could tell. Part of him was pleased by this; it meant she had been deceived by Dmitri too, or at least, left in the dark. Not that she sounded like a woman betrayed, of course; indeed, she sounded as if she thought it might be a good development. “My God,” she said as they finished sharing what impressions they had of the situation, “things are getting complicated, aren’t they?” “Yes they are.” A couple days later she confirmed the news to Frank. She had talked to Dmitri, and he had said yes, they were distributing genetically engineered organisms to draw down quantities of carbon fast. It was only a pilot project and they did not expect the organisms to spread beyond Siberia. He wouldn’t say over how large of an area the GMOs had been distributed, but he did confirm that one of the lichens had been licensed from Small Delivery Systems. “Damn it,” Frank said. “That’s Yann. We really need to get him onto our team somehow.” Diane said, “I wonder if we can, now.” “Well, I think he still wants to move back to San Diego. Not that he couldn’t on his own, but maybe the center at Torrey Pines will look good to him.” “Depending on his contract, he may get very little from any work he’s done for Small Delivery. And he may not be in control of his research program.” “True.” “Let’s keep making the offer. Funding and freedom in San Diego—he may still go for it.” Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, science itself proceeded in its usual manner; which is to say, very slowly. Anna Quibler liked it that way. Take a problem, break it down into parts (analyze), quantify whatever parts you could, see if what you learned suggested anything about causes and effects; then see if this suggested anything about long-term plans, and tangible things to do. She did not believe in revolution of any kind, and only trusted the mass application of the scientific method to get any real-world results. “One step at a time,” she would say to her team in bioinformatics, or Nick’s math group at school, or the National Science Board; and she hoped that as long as chaos did not erupt worldwide, one step at a time would eventually get them to some tolerable state. Of course there were all the hysterical operatics of “history” to distract people from this method and its incremental successes. The wars and politicians, the police state regimes and terrorist insurgencies, the gross injustices and cruelties, the unnecessarily ongoing plagues and famines—in short, all the mass violence and rank intimidation that characterized most of what filled the history books; all that was real enough, indeed all too real, undeniable—and yet it was not the whole story. It was not really history, if you wished to include everything important that had happened to humans through time. Because along with all the violence, underneath the radar, inside the nightmare, there was always the ongoing irregular but encouraging pulse of good work, often, since the seventeenth century, created or supported by science. Ongoing increases in health and longevity, for larger and larger percentages of the population: that could be called progress. If they could hold on to what they had done, and get everyone in the world to that bettered state, it would actually Anna was thus a progressive in that limited sense, of evolution not revolution. And for her, science was the medium of progress, progress’s mode of production, if she understood that term; science was both the method of analysis and the design for action. The action itself—that was politics, and thus a descent back into the Bad Zone of history, with all its struggles and ultimately its wars. But those could be defined as the breakdown of the plan, the replacement of the plan by a violent counterplan. The violence was exerted against the plan; and if ever violence was justified, as being necessary to put a good plan into action, the secondary and tertiary results usually were so bad that the justification could later be proved untrue, the plan itself betrayed by the negative effects of its violent implementation. Progress had to be made peaceably and collectively. It did not arrive violently. It had to be accomplished by positive actions. Positive ends required positive means, and never otherwise. Except, was this true? Sometimes her disgust with the selfishness of the administration she was working for grew so intense that she would have been very happy to see the population rise up and storm the White House, tear it down and hand the furniture to the overstuffed fools who had already wrecked the rest of the government. Violent anger if not violent action. Given these feelings, one obvious opportunity for constructive action had been getting scientists involved in the presidential campaign. Whether or not the SSEEP idea was a good one was very hard for her to judge, but in for a penny in for a pound; and she figured that as an experiment it would give some results, one way or another. Unless it didn’t because of a poor design, any results lost in the noise of everything else going on. The social sciences, she thought, must have a terrible time designing experiments that yielded anything confirmable. So, ambiguous results, at best; but meanwhile it was still worth trying. Her actual involvement with the election campaign was at third or fourth remove, which was just the way she liked it, and probably the only way that it remained legal. She could certainly talk to Charlie about things Phil Chase could do as a candidate, if he wanted to, that might help him win. Or even propose actions to him that Phil might initiate; after which they could respond however they wanted, and she could go back to the things she did at NSF directly. Whether they did anything or not was their concern; and so she was not actively working for a candidate. This was partly the usual scientist’s disconnect from political action, which was itself partly a realism about doing what one could. In any case she preferred spending that kind of time working on her archeology of great lost ideas in federal science policy. She had already gotten Charlie to convince Phil to introduce a bill to the Senate that would revive FCCSET in an even stronger form, under the guise of being part of a larger “Climate Planned Response,” or CPR. Now she was finding the fossil remnants of various foreign-aid programs that had been focused on science infrastructural proliferation, as she called it. Some of these were inactive because they were funding starved; others had been discontinued. Anna got Diane to assign Laveta and her team to liaise with the UN’s environmental offices, to connect these kinds of projects with funding sources. “Let’s fund them ourselves when we can’t find anyone else,” Diane suggested. “Let’s get a group together to start rating these projects and awarding grants.” “And Frank would say that group should start writing requests for proposal.” Diane nodded. “For sure.” NSF was now disbursing money at a truly unprecedented rate. The ten-billion-a-year budget goal, only recently achieved, looked like pump-priming compared to what they were now passing out. Though Congress still would not fully fund the repair of the District of Columbia, the right people on the right committees had been scared enough by the flood to start funding whatever efforts seemed most likely to keep their own districts from suffering the same fate. Maybe it was just a matter of politicians wanting to look statesmanlike when the big moment arrived; maybe they were just reflecting what they were hearing from home; maybe the two parties were jockeying for favor in the upcoming election. Whatever the cause, NSF had a supplementary budget this fiscal year of almost twenty billion dollars, and if they could find good ways to spend other federal money, Congress tended to back them. “They lived through this winter and they’ve seen the light,” Edgardo said. Anna maintained that the economy could always have afforded to pay for public work like this—that it was not even a particularly large share of the total economy—but that for so many years they had lived within the premises of a war economy that they had forgotten how much humans produced. Now that it was being redirected a little, it was becoming clearer how much the war economy had drained off. “Interesting,” Edgardo said, looking intently at her. She very seldom talked about politics. “I wonder if it will correlate with the carbon economy. I mean, that we blew the fossil-fuel surplus on wars, and lost the chance to use a onetime surplus to construct a Utopian scientific society. So now we are past the overshoot, and doomed to struggle in extreme danger for some birth-defected smaller version of just-good-enoughness.” “One step at a time,” Anna insisted. “By the year 2500 it should all look the same.” She liked the way she could make Edgardo laugh. It was easy, in a way; you only had to say out loud the most horrible thing you could imagine and he would shout with laughter, tears springing to his eyes. And she had to admit there was something bracing about his attitude. He bubbled away like a fountain of acids—everything from vinegar to hydrochloric—and it made you laugh. Once you had said the worst, a certain sting was removed; the secret fear of it, perhaps, the superstition that if you said it aloud you made it more likely to come to pass, as with Charlie and disease. Maybe the reverse was true, and nothing you said out loud could thereafter come true, because of the Pauli exclusion principle or something like it. So now she exchanged dire prophecies with Edgardo freely, to defuse them and to make him laugh. You needed a theory of black comedy to get through these days anyway, because there was little of any other kind around. Anna worked every minute of her hours at work, until her alarm went off and reminded her it was time to go home. Then she took the Metro home, thankful that it was running again, using that time stubbornly to continue processing jackets, as she used to before the Foundation had gone into crisis mode. Continuing the real work. At home she found that Charlie had been once again sucked into helping Phil Chase’s campaign, an inevitable process now that it was coming down to the wire and they were all doing everything they could; so that he had barely managed to watch Joe while talking on the phone, and had not remembered to go to the store. So off she went, driving so she could stock up on more groceries than could be carried, boggled once again by the destitute look of their grocery store, the best one in the area but sovietized like all the rest of them by the epidemic of hoarding that had plagued her fellow citizens ever since the cold snap, if not the flood. Hoarding was a bad thing; it represented a loss of faith in the system’s ability to supply the necessities reliably. While there might have been some rational basis to it in the beginning, what it now meant is that every time she went to the store huge sections of the shelves were empty, particularly of those products that would be needed in an emergency and could be stored at home: toilet paper, bottled water, flour, rice, canned goods. People were storing these in their houses rather than letting them be stored in the store. She was still waiting for the time when every household maxed, so that when the stores got a shipment the goods would not fly out the doors. It also looked like certain fresh foods were permanently in shorter supply than they had been before the long winter. This was a different problem entirely. So she had to hunt for whatever could be used, buy a few meals’ worth of ingredients, some fast stuff, and hurry home to find Charlie still on the phone, vociferating, while also placating Joe about Anna’s absence. He had gotten water on to boil, so they were that far ahead. But Nick had spaced on homework and Joe was whining, and Charlie was engrossed in trying to get his boss elected president of the United States, after which things would supposedly calm back down. Aaack! Oh well; time to heft Joe onto her hip and see if he would help make a salad, while consulting with Nick on math. It would all be better by the year 2500. Not for the first time, it struck her that things were calmer and more relaxing at work than they were at home. Or rather, that wherever she was, it always seemed like it was calmer at the other place. Was that normal? And if so, what did it mean? Back at work, where the calm was again not actually noticeable as such, the climate amelioration projects were still taking up the bulk of their efforts. Carbon capture and sequestration, cleaner energy sources, cleaner transport: each area by itself was massive and complex, and correlating them was really more than their systems could accomplish. Although Frank had established a model modeling group, to study ways to model their efforts as a single thing. Meanwhile they continued the work on their own fronts, and reported back to Diane and Laveta. Bioinformatics was still expanding at a tremendous speed, although here as elsewhere they were running into the same problem they had encountered with the climate: they knew things, but they couldn’t act on them. Getting genetically modified DNA into living humans was still proving to be an enormous obstacle. On the climate front, the North Atlantic project was entrained and happening, therefore out of their hands; and everywhere else, they were running into the tail-wagging-dog difficulty that Edgardo had named Fat Dog Syndrome; the dog was too fat for the tail to wag it, no matter how excited the tail got. They tried to quantify this impression by using cascade math to model ways for distributing money that would perturb other sources of it, finding capital at “high angles of repose,” venture capital, pension funds, investment banks, the stock markets, futures markets. Indeed, if they could get the markets to invest, they would really be tapping into the economy’s surplus value, redirecting it to purposes actually useful. But whether these efforts were finding anything useful in the real world was an open question. “Big profits in global cooling,” Edgardo said. “Perturbation.” Anna liked the sound of the word and the concept. “It’s a network, and we perturb it in ways that stimulate harmonics.” She thought the math describing this system’s behavior was more interesting than the cascade theories, which always went back to chaos theory. Her urge to orderliness made her extremely interested in chaos theory, but the math itself was not as appealing to her as the stuff on harmonics in a network, which tended to describe stabilities rather than breakdowns. Just neater somehow. “Like cat’s cradle,” Diane said once, looking at a diagram on Frank’s screen. “I wish,” Anna said. “If only we could just stick in some fingers and lift it out into something entirely new! Something simpler. Release a few complications— that used to be a cool move in cat’s cradle when I was a girl…” But the truth was, the interlocking networks of human institutions were woven into such a tight mesh that it was hard to get any wave functions or simplifications going. They were tied down like Gulliver by all their rules and regulations. Only the violence of the original perturbation—the flood in Washington—was getting them as much flex as they were seeing; that and the hard winter. Any more than that they were going to have to create by lots of small actions, repeated many times. So their work went on, under the radar for the most part, unreported in the news. The only exceptions were the most visible and large-scale of the weather projects. For these the public scrutiny was intense, the reaction all over the map. Most of the projects proposed had broad public support. Even the more blatant interventions, like bioengineered bacteria or lichen, had the support of an admittedly smaller majority, like sixty percent. People were ready to try things. The traffic jams and empty stores were getting to them in ways that news reports of distant storms had not. Phil Chase was noticing that on the campaign trail. “People are fed up with the disruptions,” he said to his staff. “Listen to what they’re telling us. Too many hassles when things break down. Try anything you can think of, they’re saying, to get levels of service and convenience back to what they used to be.” In his speeches he continued to say something FDR had said back in the 1930s: “The solution is to be found in a program of bold and persistent experimentation.” As a scientist Anna had to like that. They were designing, funding, and executing experiments. Compiling a hypothetical candidate’s most scientifically defensible positions was just one experiment among all the rest of them. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t, but they would learn something from it either way. She even began to see what she thought might be ripples caused by her perturbations, cascading through the global scientific network of institutions, the agencies and companies and academies and labs—the scientific polyarchy, from individual scientists up to labs, institutions, corporations, and countries. Tugging on the cat’s cradle, stomping on the dog’s tail. She would go to Frank to talk about amplifying some of these perturbations, also about ways Frank’s new projects could sometimes be executed by the already-existing scientific network. Then to Charlie she would talk about what Phil should be proposing in his campaign. Phil was certainly making climate change a major issue—a calculated risk for sure, given the American penchant for denial, particularly of problems caused by Americans. The president himself constantly urged denial as a kind of virtue, and denounced the climate issue as a universal downer—which it was—although he was no longer trying to claim that it was a nonexistent problem. Phil Chase was not hesitant in bringing up the subject, or in proposing to tackle the problem. Charlie wrote parts of speeches, fed Roy facts and ideas, and discussed strategy on a daily basis. At night he would sit with Anna and watch Phil say things like, “Climate change is obviously real, and byproducts of our economy have had a role in this global warming. Republicans by denying this have compounded the problem, and lost our descendants hundreds of fellow species, and decades of work. Now it’s time to do something about it, and I’m the one with the will to do it. We’re going to need to work at this, it needs to become a big part of the national project, the focus of our economy. In that sense it is actually an incredible opportunity for new industries. We’re on the verge of a truly life-affirming and sustainable global economy, based on justice and nurturing the biosphere, rather than strip-mining and fouling it. I’m ready to lead the way in starting to treat this planet like our home.” Anna could always tell when Charlie had written what Phil was saying, because Charlie would hold his breath for however long it took Phil to say it. “Whew! Am I crazy?” he would gasp afterward. “I must be crazy! Why is Phil trusting me? He’s freaking me out here!” And yet all this seemed to be part of what was helping Phil’s numbers; maybe even the main part. He had always polled highest the more he ignored conventional inside-the-Beltway political wisdom. As a California politician this was more or less a traditional tactic, reinforced by each subsequent success, as with their recent grandstanding governor. Just go for it, baby! Washington punditry was for girlie men! Thus now, when Phil was asked about the “Virtual Scientist Candidate,” he would smile his glorious smile. “In Europe a candidate like that is called a shadow candidate. I take the people inventing this candidate to be our allies, because if you judge the effect of your vote by rational scientific criteria, then you will never throw it away on a splinter party that doesn’t have a chance in our winner-take-all system. You vote for the potential winner most likely to express something like your views, and at this moment I’m that man. So the science guy is His numbers rose again. It seemed to Anna that it was going to be a really close election; so close she could hardly stand to contemplate it. Edgardo agreed. “People like it that way. Seesaw back and forth, try to get it perfectly level for election day. Confound the polls by sitting inside their margins of error. That way the day itself will bring a surprise. A bit of drama, just for its own sake. Policy has nothing to do with it, life and death have nothing to do with it. People just like a good race. They like their little surprises.” “They may get a big surprise this time,” Anna said. “They don’t like big surprises. Only little surprises will do.” On it went. The summer passed, giving them several weeks in a row of weather so cool and pleasant that abrupt climate change began to seem like a blessing. During that time several of the FCCSET programs were linked, and suddenly Department of Energy was on their side—it was actually unnerving— and they were in hot pursuit of what looked like a really powerful photovoltaic cell. Previously the polymers in plastic solar cells had absorbed only visible light, converting about six percent of the sun’s energy to electrical power; now researchers were mixing semiconducting nanoparticles called quantum dots into one of the layers, which absorbed infrared light and generated electricity as well. A layering of both yielded an efficiency of thirty percent, and now the mythical ten-by-ten mile array of cells, set somewhere in New Mexico and powering the whole country, was beginning to look like an actual possibility. Anna went on to her other work, feeling pleased. Perturbation of the network! Cat’s cradle, slip and pull! When she went home she would be able to sit there and listen to Charlie’s talk about the campaign without getting as anxious and irritated as before—knowing, as she watched the news sprawl across the screen like a giant Jerry Springer show they could not escape, that always underneath it the great work rolled on. Anna’s great work, however, was basically a linear process; and it existed in a world with some important nonlinear components, acting in different realms. One morning at home with Joe, Charlie got a call from Roy Anastophoulus. “Roy!” “Charlie are you sitting down?” “I am not sitting down, I “That’s what you think! Charlie I’ve got Wade Norton on the other line and I’m going to patch him in. Wade? Can you still hear me?” A second or two of satellite time, and then Charlie heard Wade, speaking from Antarctica: “I can still hear you. Hi Charlie, how are you?” “I’m fine, Wade,” resisting the urge to speak louder so that Wade could still hear him down there at the bottom of the world. “What’s happening?” “I’m on a flight over the Ross Sea, and I’m looking at a big tabular berg that’s just come off from the coastline. Really really really big. It’ll be on the news soon, but I wanted to call you guys and tell you. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has started to come off big time.” “Oh my God. You’re looking at a piece of it already off?” “Yes. It’s about a hundred miles long, the pilot says.” “My God. So sea level has already gone up a foot?” “You got it Charlie! I was trying to tell Roy.” “That’s why “I had better sit down,” Charlie admitted, feeling a little wobble, as for instance the axis of the Earth. “Any guesses by the scientists down there as to how fast the rest will come off?” “They don’t know. It’s happening faster than they expected. Some of them are running a pool now, and the bets range from a decade to a century. Apparently the goo underneath the ice is the consistency of toothpaste. It lets the ice slide, and the tides tug at it, and there’s an active volcano down underneath there too.” “Shit.” “So we’re talking sea-level rise?” Roy asked, trying to get confirmation. “Yes,” Wade said. “Hey boys I’ve got to go, I just wanted to let someone know. I’ll talk to you more soon.” He got off and Charlie then explained the situation to Roy. Giant ice sheet, warming, cracking—sliding off its underwater perch—floating away in chunks, displacing more water than it had when perched. If the whole thing came off, sea level up seven meters. A quarter of the world’s population affected, perhaps fifty trillion dollars in human and natural capital at risk. Conservatively. Roy said, “Okay Charlie. I get the point. It sounds like it will help Phil in the campaign.” “Roy, please. Not funny.” “I’m not being funny.” Although he was laughing like a loon. “I’m talking about addressing the problem! If Phil doesn’t win, what do you think will happen?” “Okay okay. Shit. My God.” Everything Anna and her colleagues had been doing to restart the Gulf Stream was as nothing to this news. Changing currents, maybe—but “Yes they do.” |
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