Forty Signs of Rain
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,

characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the

author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons,

living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollins Publishers 2004

Copyright © Kim Stanley Robinson 2004

The Author asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

Verse from ‘The Lockless Door’ from ‘The Poetry of Robert

Frost’, edited by Edward Connery Latham, published

by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of

the Random House Group Ltd.

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Source ISBN: 9780007148882

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN 9780007396658

Version: 2016-08-24

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

ONE The Buddha Arrives

TWO In the Hyperpower

THREE Intellectual Merit

FOUR Science in the Capital

FIVE Athena on the Pacific

SIX The Capital in Science

SEVEN Tit for Tat

EIGHT A Paradigm Shift

NINE Trigger Event

TEN Broader Impacts

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

ONE The Buddha Arrives

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

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

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

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

That was last year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Rig yal ba! Chos min gon pa!’

The others all exclaimed, ‘Jetsun Gyatso!’

The old man bowed to them.

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

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

Anna approached the window. The little sign said

EMBASSY OF KHEMBALUNG

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

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

Maybe it was a scientific country.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, I saw that, but …’

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

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

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

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

‘We chose it very carefully,’ the young monk said.

They regarded each other.

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

‘Thank you.’ Again he nodded.

Anna did the same and took her leave.

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

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

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

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

She walked back over to him.

He saw her coming, composed his features. ‘Yes?’

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

‘Why, thank you,’ he said. ‘That would be most kind.’

‘Is there a particular day that would be good?’

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

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

‘That would be most welcome. Very kind.’

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

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

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

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

‘An embassy, here?’

‘I’m not sure they know much about Washington.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Did they say why they rented the space here?’

‘They said they had picked it very carefully.’

‘Using what criteria?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Let’s see if it arrived.’ He hit CHECK MAIL, and up came a new one from aquibler@nsf.gov. He loved that address. ‘It’s here, I’ll take a look at it.’

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

‘End of July or end of August.’

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

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

‘Thanks. It would be good to have you here.’

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

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

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

They laughed.

‘And you have your journal work too.’

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

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

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

‘Yes, of course.’ Frank nodded uncomfortably, touched despite himself; he valued her opinion. He rolled his chair towards his screen as if to get to work, and she turned and left.

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

‘Hey Anna?’ he called out.

‘Yes?’ She reappeared in the doorway.

‘I know one of the guys on this jacket. The PI is a guy from Caltech, but the real work is by one of his students.’

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

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

‘That wouldn’t be enough to be a conflict.’

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

‘Ah. Do you still have any financial stake in it?’

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

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

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

‘That’s fine, then. Go for it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO In the Hyperpower

Mathematics sometimes seems like a universe of its own. But it comes to us as part of the brain’s engagement with the world, and appears to be part of the world, its structure or recipe.

Over historical time humanity has explored further and further into the various realms of mathematics, in a cumulative and collective process, an ongoing conversation between the species and reality. The discovery of the calculus. The invention of formal arithmetic and symbolic logic, both mathematicizing the instinctive strategies of human reason, making them as distinct and solid as geometric proofs. The attempt to make the entire system contained and self-consistent. The invention of set theory, and the finessing of the various paradoxes engendered by considering sets as members of themselves. The discovery of the incompletability of all systems. The step-by-step mechanics of programming new calculating machines. All this resulted in an amalgam of maths and logic, the symbols and methods drawn from both realms, combining in the often long and complicated operations that we call algorithms.

In the time of the development of the algorithm, we also made discoveries in the real world: the double helix within our cells. DNA. Within half a century the whole genome was read, base pair by base pair. Three billion base pairs, parts of which are called genes, and serve as instruction packets for protein creation.

But despite the fully explicated genome, the details of its expression and growth are still very mysterious. Spiralling pairs of cytosine, guanine, adenosine, and thymine: we know these are instructions for growth, for the development of life, all coded in sequences of paired elements. We know the elements; we see the organisms. The code between them remains to be learned.

Mathematics continues to develop under the momentum of its own internal logic, seemingly independent of everything else. But several times in the past, purely mathematical developments have later proved to be powerfully descriptive of operations in nature that were either unknown or unexplainable at the time the math was being developed. This is a strange fact, calling into question all that we think we know about the relationship between maths and reality, the mind and the cosmos.

Perhaps no explanation of this mysterious adherence of nature to mathematics of great subtlety will ever be forthcoming. Meanwhile, the operations called algorithms become ever more convoluted and interesting to those devising them. Are they making portraits, recipes, magic spells? Does reality use algorithms, do genes use algorithms? The mathematicians can’t say, and many of them don’t seem to care. They like the work, whatever it is.

Leo Mulhouse kissed his wife Roxanne and left their bedroom. In the living room the light was halfway between night and dawn. He went out onto their balcony: screeching gulls, the rumble of the surf against the cliff below. The vast grey plate of the Pacific Ocean.

Leo had married into this spectacular house, so to speak; Roxanne had inherited it from her mother. Its view from the edge of the sea cliff in Leucadia, California, was something Leo loved, but the little grass yard below the second-storey porch was only about fifteen feet wide, and beyond it was an open gulf of air and the grey foaming ocean, eighty feet below. And not that stable a cliff. He wished that the house had been placed a little farther back on its lot.

Back inside, fill his travel coffee cup, down to the car. Down Europa, past the Pannikin, hang a right and head to work.

The Pacific Coast Highway in San Diego County was a beautiful drive at dawn. In any kind of weather it was handsome: in new sun with all the pale blues lifting out of the sea, in scattered cloud when shards and rays of horizontal sunlight broke through, or on rainy or foggy mornings when the narrow but rich palette of greys filled the eye with the subtlest of gradations. The grey dawns were by far the most frequent, as the region’s climate settled into what appeared to be a permanent El Niño – the Hyperniño, as people called it. The whole idea of a Mediterranean climate leaving the world, even in the Mediterranean, people said. Here coastal residents were getting sunlight deficiency disorders, and taking vitamin D and anti-depressants to counteract the effects, even though ten miles inland it was a cloudless baking desert all the year round. The June Gloom had come home to roost.

Leo Mulhouse took the coast highway to work every morning. He liked seeing the ocean, and feeling the slight roller-coaster effect of dropping down to cross the lagoons, then motoring back up little rises to Cardiff, Solano Beach and Del Mar. These towns looked best at this hour, deserted and as if washed for the new day. Hiss of tyres on wet road, wet squeak of windshield wipers, distant boom of the waves breaking – it all combined to make a kind of aquatic experience, the drive like surfing, up and down the same bowls every time, riding the perpetual wave of land about to break into the sea.

Up the big hill onto Torrey Pines, past the golf course, quick right into Torrey Pines Generique. Down into its parking garage, descending into the belly of work. Into the biotech beast.

Meaning a complete security exam, just to get in. If they didn’t know what you came in with, they wouldn’t be able to judge what you went out with. So, metal detector, inspection by the bored security team with their huge coffee cups, computer turned on, hardware and software check by experts, sniff-over by Clyde the morning dog, trained to detect signature molecules: all standard in biotech now, after some famous incidents of industrial espionage. The stakes were too high to trust anybody.

Then Leo was inside the compound, walking down long white hallways. He put his coffee on his desk, turned on his desktop computer, went out to check the experiments in progress. The most important current one was reaching an endpoint, and Leo was particularly interested in the results. They had been using high-throughput screening of some of the many thousands of proteins listed in the Protein Data Bank at UCSD, trying to identify some that would activate certain cells in a way that would make these cells express more high-density lipoprotein than they would normally – perhaps ten times as much. Ten times as much HDL, the ‘good cholestorol’, would be a life-saver for people suffering from any number of ailments – atherosclerosis, obesity, diabetes, even Alzheimer’s. Any one of these ailments mitigated (or cured!) would be worth billions; a therapy that helped all of them would be – well. It explained the high-alert security enclosing the compound, that was for sure.

The experiment was proceeding but not yet done, so Leo went back to his office and drank his coffee and read Bioworld Today onscreen. Higher through-put screening robotics, analysis protocols for artificial hormones, proteomic analyses – every article could have described something that was going on at Torrey Pines Generique. The whole industry was looking for ways to improve the hunt for therapeutic proteins, and for ways to get those proteins into living people. Half the day’s articles were devoted to one of these problems or the other, as in any other issue of the newszine. They were the recalcitrant outstanding problems, standing between ‘biotechnology’ as an idea and medicine as it actually existed. If they didn’t solve these problems, the idea and the industry based on it could go the way of nuclear power, and turn into something that somehow did not work out. If they did solve them, then it would turn into something more like the computer industry in terms of financial returns – not to mention the impacts on health of course!

When Leo next checked the lab, two of his assistants, Marta and Brian, were standing at the bench, both wearing lab coats and rubber gloves, working the pipettes on a bank of flasks filling a countertop.

‘Good morning guys.’

‘Hey Leo.’ Marta aimed her pipette like a power-point cursor at the small window on a long low refrigerator. ‘Ready to check it out?’

‘Sure am. Can you help?’

‘In just a sec.’ She moved down the bench.

Brian said, ‘This better work, because Derek just told the press that it was the most promising self-healing therapy of the decade.’

Leo was startled to hear this. ‘No. You’re kidding.’

‘I’m not kidding.’

‘Oh not really. Not really.’

‘Really.’

‘How could he?’

‘Press release. Also calls to his favourite reporters, and on his webpage. The chat room is already talking about the ramifications. They’re betting one of the big pharms will buy us within the month.’

‘Please Bri, don’t be saying these things.’

‘Sorry, but you know Derek.’ Brian gestured at one of the computer screens glowing on the bench across the way. ‘It’s all over.’

Leo squinted at a screen. ‘It wasn’t on Bioworld Today.’

‘It will be tomorrow.’

The company’s website Breaking News box was blinking. Leo leaned over and jabbed it. Yep – lead story. HDL factory, potential for obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease …

‘Oh my God,’ Leo muttered as he read. ‘Oh my God.’ His face was flushed. ‘Why does he do this?’

‘He wants it to be true.’

‘So what? We don’t know yet.’

With her sly grin Marta said, ‘He wants you to make it happen, Leo. He’s like the Roadrunner and you’re Wile E. Coyote. He gets you to run off the edge of a cliff, and then you have to build the bridge back to the cliff before you fall.’

‘But it never works! He always falls!’

Marta laughed at him. She liked him, but she was tough. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This time we’ll do it.’

Leo nodded, tried to calm down. He appreciated Marta’s spirit, and liked to be at least as positive as the most positive person in any given situation. That was getting tough these days, but he smiled the best he could and said, ‘Yeah, right, you’re good,’ and started to put on rubber gloves.

‘Remember the time he announced that we had haemophilia A whipped?’ Brian said.

‘Please.’

‘Remember the time he put out a press release saying he had decapitated mice at a thousand r.p.m. to show how well our therapy worked?’

‘The guillotine turntable experiment?’

‘Please,’ Leo begged. ‘No more.’

He picked up a pipette and tried to focus on the work. Withdraw, inject, withdraw, inject – alas, most of the work in this stage was automated, leaving people free to think whether they wanted to or not. After a while Leo left them to it and went back to his office to check his e-mail, then helplessly to read what portion of Derek’s press release he could stomach. ‘Why does he do this, why why why?’

It was a rhetorical question, but Marta and Brian were now standing in the doorway, and Marta was implacable: ‘I tell you – he thinks he can make us do it.’

‘It’s not us doing it,’ Leo protested, ‘it’s the gene. We can’t do a thing if the altered gene doesn’t get into the cell we’re trying to target.’

‘You’ll just have to think of something that will work.’

‘You mean like, build it and they will come?’

‘Yeah. Say it and they will make it.’

Out in the lab a timer beeped, sounding uncannily like the Roadrunner. Beep-beep! Beep-beep! They went to the incubator and read the graph paper as it rolled out of the machine, like a receipt out of an automated teller – like money out of an automated teller, in fact, if the results were good. One very big wad of twenties rolling out into the world from nowhere, if the numbers were good.

And they were. They were very good. They would have to plot it to be sure, but they had been doing this series of experiments for so long that they knew what the raw data would look like. The data were good. So now they were like Wile E. Coyote, standing in midair staring amazed at the viewers, because a bridge from the cliff had magically extended out and saved them. Saved them from the long plunge of a retraction in the press and subsequent Nasdaq free-fall.

Except that Wile E. Coyote was invariably premature in his sense of relief. The Roadrunner always had another devastating move to make. Leo’s hand was shaking.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I would be totally celebrating right now if it weren’t for Derek. Look at this –’ pointing – ‘it’s even better than before.’

‘See, Derek knew it would turn out like this.’

‘The fuck he did.’

‘Pretty good numbers,’ Brian said with a grin. ‘Paper’s almost written too. It’s just plug these in and do a conclusion.’

Marta said, ‘Conclusions will be simple, if we tell the truth.’

Leo nodded. ‘Only problem is, the truth would have to admit that even though this part works, we still don’t have a therapy, because we haven’t got targeted delivery. We can make it but we can’t get it into living bodies where it needs to be.’

‘You didn’t read the whole website,’ Marta told him, smiling angrily again.

‘What do you mean?’ Leo was in no mood for teasing. His stomach had already shrunk to the size of a walnut.

Marta laughed, which was her way of showing sympathy without admitting to any. ‘He’s going to buy Urtech.’

‘What’s Urtech?’

‘They have a targeted delivery method that works.’

‘What do you mean, what would that be?’

‘It’s new. They just got awarded the patent on it.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Oh my God. It hasn’t been validated?’

‘Except by the patent, and Derek’s offer to buy it, no.’

‘Oh my God. Why does he do this kind of stuff?’

‘Because he intends to be the CEO of the biggest pharmaceutical of all time. Like he told People magazine.’

‘Yeah right.’

Torrey Pines Generique, like most biotech start-ups, was undercapitalized, and could only afford a few rolls of the dice. One of them had to look promising to attract the capital that would allow it to grow further. That was what they had been trying to accomplish for the five years of the company’s existence, and the effort was just beginning to show results with these experiments. What they needed now was to be able to insert their successfully tailored gene into the patient’s own cells, so that afterwards it would be the patient’s own body producing increased amounts of the needed proteins. If that worked, there would be no immune response from the body’s immune system, and with the protein being produced in therapeutic amounts, the patient would be not just helped, but cured.

Amazing.

But (and it was getting to be a big but) the problem of getting the altered DNA into living patients’ cells hadn’t been solved. Leo and his people were not physiologists, and they hadn’t been able to do it. No one had. Immune systems existed precisely to keep these sorts of intrusions from happening. Indeed, one method of inserting the altered DNA into the body was to put it into a virus and give the patient a viral infection, benign in its ultimate effects because the altered DNA reached its target. But since the body fought viral infections, it was not a good solution. You didn’t want to compromise further the immune systems of people who were already sick.

So, for a long time now they had been in the same boat as everyone else, chasing the holy grail of gene therapy, a ‘targeted non-viral delivery system’. Any company that came up with such a system, and patented it, would immediately have the method licensed for scores of procedures, and very likely one of the big pharmaceuticals would buy the company, making everyone in it rich, and often still employed. Over time the pharmaceutical might dismantle the acquisition, keeping only the method, but at that point the startup’s employees would be wealthy enough to laugh that off – retire and go surfing, or start up another start-up and try to hit the jackpot again. At that point it would be more of a philanthropic hobby than the cut-throat struggle to make a living that it often seemed before the big success arrived.

So the hunt for a targeted non-viral delivery system was most definitely on, in hundreds of labs around the world. And now Derek had bought one of these labs. Leo stared at the new announcement on the company website. Derek had to have bought it on spec, because if the method had been well-proven, there was no way Derek would have been able to afford it. Some biotech firm even smaller than Torrey Pines – Urtech, based in Bethesda, Maryland (Leo had never heard of it) – had convinced Derek that they had found a way to deliver altered DNA into humans. Derek had made the purchase without consulting Leo, his chief research scientist. His scientific advice had to have come from his vice president, Dr Sam Houston, an old friend and early partner. A man who had not done lab work in a decade.

So. It was true.

Leo sat at his desk, trying to relax his stomach. They would have to assimilate this new company, learn their technique, test it. It had been patented, Leo noted, which meant they had it exclusively at this point, as a kind of trade secret – a concept many working scientists had trouble accepting. A secret scientific method? Was that not a contradiction in terms? Of course a patent was a matter of public record, and eventually it would enter the public domain. So it wasn’t a trade secret in literal fact. But at this stage it was secret enough. And it could not be a sure thing. There wasn’t much published about it, as far as Leo could tell. Some papers in preparation, some papers submitted, one paper accepted – he would have to check that one out as soon as possible – and a patent. Sometimes they awarded them so early. One or two papers were all that supported the whole approach.

Secret science. ‘God damn it,’ Leo said to his room. Derek had bought a pig in a poke. And Leo was going to have to open the poke and poke around.

There was a hesitant knock on his opened door, and he looked up.

‘Oh hi, Yann, how are you?’

‘I’m good Leo, thanks. I’m just coming by to say goodbye. I’m back to Pasadena now, my job here is finished.’

‘Too bad. I bet you could have helped us figure out this pig in a poke we just bought.’

‘Really?’

Yann’s face brightened like a child’s. He was a true mathematician, and had what Leo considered to be the standard mathematician personality: smart, spacy, enthusiastic, full of notions. All these qualities were a bit under the surface, until you really got him going. As Marta had remarked, not unkindly (for her), if it weren’t for the head tilt and the speed-talking, he wouldn’t have seemed like a mathematician at all. Whatever; Leo liked him, and his work on protein identification had been really interesting, and potentially very helpful.

‘Actually, I don’t know what we’ve got yet,’ Leo admitted. ‘It’s likely to be a biology problem, but who knows? You sure have been helpful with our selection protocols.’

‘Thanks, I appreciate that. I may be back anyway, I’ve got a project going with Sam’s math team that might pan out. If it does they’ll try to hire me on another temporary contract, he says.’

‘That’s good to hear. Well, have fun in Pasadena in the meantime.’

‘Oh I will. See you soon.’

And their best biomaths guy slipped out the door.

Charlie Quibler had barely woken when Anna left for work. He got up an hour later to his own alarm, woke up Nick with difficulty, got him to dress and eat, put the still-sleeping Joe in his car seat while Nick climbed in the other side of the car. ‘Have you got your backpack and your lunch?’ – this not always being the case – and off to Nick’s school. They dropped him off, returned home to fall asleep again on the couch, Joe never waking during the entire process. An hour or so later he would rouse them both with his hungry cries, and then the day would really begin, the earlier interval like a problem dream that always played out the same.

‘Joey and Daddy!’ Charlie would say then, or ‘Joe and Dad at home, here we go!’ or ‘How about breakfast? Here – how about you get into your playpen for a second, and I’ll go warm up some of Mom’s milk.’

This had always worked like a charm with Nick, and sometimes Charlie forgot and put Joe down in the old blue plastic playpen in the living room, but if he did Joe would let out a scandalized howl the moment he saw where he was. Joe refused to associate with baby things; even getting him into the car seat or the baby backpack or the stroller was a matter of very strict invariability. Where choices were known to be possible, Joe rejected the baby stuff as an affront to his dignity.

So now Charlie had Joe there with him in the kitchen, crawling underfoot or investigating the gate that blocked the steep stairs to the cellar. Careering around like a human pinball. Anna had taped bubblewrap to all the corners; it looked like the kitchen had just recently arrived and not yet been completely unpacked.

‘Okay watch out now, don’t. Don’t! Your bottle will be ready in a second.’

‘Ba!’

‘Yes, bottle.’

This was satisfactory, and Joe plopped on his butt directly under Charlie’s feet. Charlie worked over him, taking some of Anna’s frozen milk out of the freezer and putting it in a pot of warming water on the back burner. Anna had her milk stored in precise quantities of either four or ten ounces, in tall or short permanent plastic cylinders that were filled with disposable plastic bags, capped by brown rubber nipples that Charlie had pricked many times with a needle, and topped by snap-on plastic tops to protect the nipples from contamination in the freezer. Contamination in the freezer? Charlie had wanted to ask Anna, but he hadn’t. There was a lab book on the kitchen counter for Charlie to fill out the times and amounts of Joe’s feedings. Anna liked to know these things, she said, to determine how much milk to pump at work. So Charlie logged in while the water started to bubble, thinking as he always did that the main purpose here was to fulfil Anna’s pleasure in making quantified records of any kind.

He was testing the temperature of the thawed milk by taking a quick suck on the nipple when his phone rang. He whipped on a headset and answered.

‘Hi Charlie, it’s Roy.’

‘Oh hi Roy, what’s up?’

‘Well I’ve got your latest draft here and I’m about to read it, and I thought I’d check first to see what I should be looking for, how you solved the IPCC stuff.’

‘Oh yeah. The new stuff that matters is all in the third section.’ The bill as Charlie had drafted it for Phil would require the US to act on certain recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

‘Did you kind of bury the part about us conforming to IPCC findings?’

‘I don’t think there’s earth deep enough to bury that one. I tried to put it in a context that made it look inevitable. International body that we are part of, climate change clearly real, the UN the best body to work through global issues, support for them pretty much mandatory for us or else the whole world cooks in our juices, that sort of thing.’

‘Well, but that’s never worked before, has it? Come on, Charlie, this is Phil’s big pre-election bill and you’re his climate guy, if he can’t get this bill out of committee then we’re in big trouble.’

‘Yeah I know. Wait just a second.’

Charlie took another test pull from the bottle. Now it was at body temperature, or almost.

‘A bit early to be hitting the bottle, Charlie, what you drinking there?’

‘Well, I’m drinking my wife’s breast milk, if you must know.’

‘Say what?’

‘I’m testing the temperature of one of Joe’s bottles. They have to be thawed to a very exact temperature or else he gets annoyed.’

‘So you’re drinking your wife’s breast milk out of a baby bottle?’

‘Yes I am.’

‘How is it?’

‘It’s good. Thin but sweet. A potent mix of protein, fat and sugar. No doubt the perfect food.’

‘I bet.’ Roy cackled. ‘Do you ever get it straight from the source?’

‘Well I try, sure, who doesn’t, but Anna doesn’t like it. She says it’s a mixed message and if I don’t watch out she’ll wean me when she weans Joe.’

‘Ah ha. So you have to take the long-term view.’

‘Yes. Although actually I tried it one time when Joe fell asleep nursing, so she couldn’t move without waking him. She was hissing at me and I was trying to get it to work but apparently you have to suck much harder than, you know, one usually would, there’s a trick to it, and I still hadn’t gotten any when Joe woke up and saw me. Anna and I froze, expecting him to freak out, but he just reached out and patted me on the head.’

‘He understood!’

‘Yeah. It was like he was saying I know how you feel, Dad, and I will share with you this amazing bounty. Didn’t you Joe?’ he said, handing him the warmed bottle. He watched with a smile as Joe took it one-handed and tilted it back, elbow thrown out like Popeye with a can of spinach. Because of all the pinpricks Charlie had made in the rubber nipples, Joe could choke down a bottle in a few minutes, and he seemed to take great satisfaction in doing so. No doubt a sugar rush.

‘Okay, well, you are a kinky guy my friend and obviously deep in the world of domestic bliss, but we’re still relying on you here and this may be the most important bill Phil introduces in this session.’

‘Come on, it’s a lot more than that, young man, it’s one of the few chances we have left to avoid complete global disaster, I mean –’

‘Preaching to the converted! Preaching to the converted!’

‘I certainly hope so.’

‘Sure sure. Okay, I’ll read this draft and get back to you a.s.a.p., I want to move on with this, and the committee discussion is now scheduled for Tuesday.’

‘That’s fine, I’ll have my phone with me all day.’

‘Sounds good, I’ll be in touch, but meanwhile be thinking about how to slip the IPCC thing in even deeper.’

‘Yeah okay but see what I did already.’

‘Sure bye.’

‘Bye.’

Charlie pulled off the headset and turned off the stove. Joe finished his bottle, inspected it, tossed it casually aside.

‘Man, you are fast,’ Charlie said as he always did. One of the mutual satisfactions of their days together was doing the same things over and over again, and saying the same things about them. Joe was not as insistent on pattern as Nick had been, in fact he liked a kind of structured variability, as Charlie thought of it, but the pleasure in repetition was still there.

There was no denying his boys were very different. When Nick had been Joe’s age, Charlie had still found it necessary to hold him cradled in his arm, head wedged in the nook of his elbow, to make him take the bottle, because Nick had had a curious moment of aversion, even when he was hungry. He would whine and refuse the nipple, perhaps because it was not the real thing, perhaps because it had taken Charlie months to learn to puncture the bottle nipples with lots of extra holes. In any case he would refuse and twist away, head whipping from side to side, and the hungrier he was the more he would do it, until with a rush like a fish to a lure he would strike, latching on and sucking desperately. It was a fairly frustrating routine, part of the larger Shock of Lost Adult Freedom that had hammered Charlie so hard that first time around, though now he could hardly remember why. A perfect image for all the compromised joys and irritations of Mr Momhood, those hundreds of sessions with reluctant Nick and his bottle.

With Joe life was in some ways much easier. Charlie was more used to it, for one thing, and Joe, though difficult in his own ways, would certainly never refuse a bottle.

Now he decided he would try again to climb the baby gate and dive down the cellar stairs, but Charlie moved quickly to detach him, then shooed him out into the dining room while cleaning up the counter, ignoring the loud cries of complaint.

‘Okay okay! Quiet! Hey, let’s go for a walk! Let’s go walk!’

‘No!’

‘Ah come on. Oh wait, it’s your day for Gymboree, and then we’ll go to the park and have lunch, and then go for a walk!’

‘NO!’

But that was just Joe’s way of saying yes.

Charlie wrestled him into the baby backpack, which was mostly a matter of controlling his legs, not an easy thing. Joe was strong, a compact animal with bulging thigh muscles, and though not as loud a screamer as Nick had been, a tough guy to overpower. ‘Gymboree, Joe! You love it! Then a walk, guy, a walk to the park!’

Off they went.

First to Gymboree, located in a big building just off Wisconsin. Gymboree was a chance to get infants together when they did not have some other daycare to do it. It was an hour-long class, and always a bit depressing, Charlie felt, to be paying to get his kid into a play situation with other kids; but there it was; without Gymboree they all would have been on their own.

Joe disappeared into the tunnels of a big plastic jungle gym. It may have been a commercial replacement for real community, but Joe didn’t know that; all he saw was that it had lots of stuff to play with and climb on, and so he scampered around the colourful structures, crawling through tubes and climbing up things, ignoring the other kids to the point of treating them as movable parts of the apparatus, which could cause problems. ‘Oops, say you’re sorry, Joe. Sorry!’

Off he shot again, evading Charlie. He didn’t want to waste any time. Once again the contrast with Nick could not have been more acute. Nick had seldom moved at Gymboree. One time he had found a giant red ball and stood embracing the thing for the full hour of the class. All the moms had stared sympathetically (or not), and the instructor, Ally, had done her best to help Charlie get him interested in something else; but Nick would not budge from his mystical red ball.

Embarrassing. But Charlie was used to that. The problem was not just Nick’s immobility or Joe’s hyperactivity, but the fact that Charlie was always the only dad there. Without him it would have been a complete momspace, and comfortable as such. He knew that his presence wrecked that comfort. It happened in all kinds of infant-toddler contexts. As far as Charlie could tell, there was not a single other man inside the Beltway who ever spent the business hours of a weekday with preschool children. It just wasn’t done. That wasn’t why people moved to DC. It wasn’t why Charlie had moved there either, for that matter, but he and Anna had talked it over before Nick was born, and they had come to the realization that Charlie could do his job (on a part-time basis anyway) and their infant care at the same time, by using phone and e-mail to keep in contact with Senator Chase’s office. Phil Chase himself had perfected the method of working at a distance back when he had been the World’s Senator, always on the road; and being the good guy he was, he had thoroughly approved of Charlie’s plan. While on the other hand Anna’s job absolutely required her to be at work at least fifty hours a week, and often more. So Charlie had happily volunteered to be the stay-at-home parent. It would be an adventure.

And an adventure it had been, there was no denying that. But first time’s a charm; and now he had been doing it for over a year with kid number two, and what had been shocking and all-absorbing with kid number one was now simply routine. The repetitions were beginning to get to him. Joe was beginning to get to him.

So now Charlie sat there in Gymboree, hanging with the moms and the nannies. A nice situation in theory, but in practice a diplomatic challenge of the highest order. No one wanted to be misunderstood. No one would regard it as a coincidence if he happened to end up talking to one of the more attractive women there, or to anyone in particular on a regular basis. That was fine with Charlie, but with Joe doing his thing, he could not completely control the situation. There was Joe now, doing it again – going after a black-haired little girl who had the perfect features of a model. Charlie was obliged to go over and make sure Joe didn’t mug her, as he was wont to do with girls he liked, and yes, the little girl had an attractive mom, or in this case a nanny – a young blonde au pair from Germany whom Charlie had spoken to before. Charlie could feel the eyes of the other women on him; not a single adult in that room believed in his innocence.

‘Hi Asta.’

‘Hello Charlie.’

He even began to doubt it himself. Asta was one of those lively European women of twenty or so who gave the impression of being a decade ahead of their American contemporaries in terms of adult experiences – not easy, given the way American teens were these days. Charlie felt a little surge of protest: it’s not me who goes after the babes, he wanted to shout, it’s my son! My son the hyperactive girl-chasing mugger! But of course he couldn’t do that, and now even Asta regarded him warily, perhaps because the first time they had chatted over their kids he had made some remark complimenting her on her child’s nice hair. He felt himself begin to blush again, remembering the look of amused surprise she had given him as she corrected him.

Singalong saved him from the moment. It was designed to calm the kids down a bit before the session ended and they had to be lassoed back into their car seats for the ride home. Joe took Ally’s announcement as his cue to dive into the depths of the tube structure, where it was impossible to follow him or to coax him out. He would only emerge when Ally started ‘Ring Around the Rosie’, which he enjoyed. Round in circles they all went, Charlie avoiding anyone’s eye but Joe’s. Ally, who was from New Jersey, belted out the lead, and so all the kids and moms joined her loudly in the final chorus:

‘Eshes, eshes, we all, fall, DOWN!’

And down they all fell.

Then it was off to the park.

Their park was a small one, located just west of Wisconsin Avenue a few blocks south of their home. A narrow grassy area held a square sandpit, which contained play structures for young kids. Tennis courts lined the south edge of the park. Out against Wisconsin stood a fire station, and to the west a field extended out to one of the many little creeks that still cut through the grid of streets.

Midday, the sandpit and the benches flanking it were almost always occupied by a few infants and toddlers, moms and nannies. Many more nannies than moms here, most of them West Indian, to judge by their appearance and voices. They sat on the benches together, resting in the steamy heat, talking. The kids wandered on their own, absorbed or bored.

Joe kept Charlie on his toes. Nick had been content to sit in one spot for long periods of time, and when playing he had been pathologically cautious; on a low wooden bouncy bridge his little fists had gone white on the chain railing. Joe however had quickly located the spot on the bridge that would launch him the highest – not the middle, but about halfway down to it. He would stand right there and jump up and down in time to the wooden oscillation until he was catching big air, his unhappy expression utterly different from Nick’s, in that it was caused by his dissatisfaction that he could not get higher. This was part of his general habit of using his body as an experimental object, including walking in front of kids on swings, etc. Countless times Charlie had been forced to jerk him out of dangerous situations, and they had become less frequent only because Joe didn’t like how loud Charlie yelled afterwards. ‘Give me a break!’ Charlie would shout. ‘What do you think, you’re made of steel?’

Now Joe was flying up and down on the bouncy bridge’s sweet spot. The sad little girl whose nanny talked on the phone for hours at a time wandered in slow circles around the merry-go-round. Charlie avoided meeting her eager eye, staring instead at the nanny and thinking it might be a good idea to stuff a note into the girl’s clothes. ‘Your daughter wanders the Earth bored and lonely at age two – SHAME!’

Whereas he was virtuous. That would have been the point of such a note, and so he never wrote it. He was virtuous, but bored. No that wasn’t really true. That was a disagreeable stereotype. He therefore tried to focus and play with his second-born. It was truly unfair how much less parental attention the second child got. With the first, although admittedly there was the huge Shock of Lost Adult Freedom to recover from, there was also the deep absorption of watching one’s own offspring – a living human being whose genes were a fifty-fifty mix of one’s own and one’s partner’s. It was frankly hard to believe that any such process could actually work, but there the kid was, out walking the world in the temporary guise of a kind of pet, a wordless little animal of surpassing fascination.

Whereas with the second one it was as they all said: just try to make sure they don’t eat out of the cat’s dish. Not always successful in Joe’s case. But not to worry. They would survive. They might even prosper. Meanwhile there was the newspaper to read.

But now here they were at the park, Joe and Dad, so might as well make the best of it. And it was true that Joe was more fun to play with than Nick had been at that age. He would chase Charlie for hours, ask to be chased, wrestle, fight, go down the slide and up the steps again like a perpetuum mobile. All this in the middle of a DC May day, the air going for a triple-triple, the sun smashing down through the wet air and diffusing until its light exploded out of a huge patch of the zenith. Sweaty gasping play, yes, but never a moment spent coaxing. Never a dull moment.

After another such runaround they sprawled on the grass to eat lunch. Both of them liked this part. Fruit juices, various baby foods carefully spooned out and inserted into Joe’s baby-bird mouth, apple sauce likewise, a Cheerio or two that he could choke down by himself. He was still mostly a breast-milk guy.

When they were done Joe struggled up to play again.

‘Oh God Joe, can’t we rest a bit.’

‘No!’

Ballasted by his meal, however, he staggered as if drunk. Naptime, as sudden as a blow to the head, would soon fell him.

Charlie’s phone beeped. He slipped in an earplug and let the cord dangle under his face, clicked it on. ‘Hello.’

‘Hi Charlie, where are you?’

‘Hey Roy. I’m at the park like always. What’s up?’

‘Well, I’ve read your latest draft, and I was wondering if you could discuss some things in it now, because we need to get it over to Senator Winston’s office so they can see what’s coming.’

‘Is that a good idea?’

‘Phil thinks we have to do it.’

‘Okay, what do you want to discuss?’

There was a pause while Roy found a place in the draft. ‘Here we go. Quote, the Congress, being deeply concerned that the lack of speed in America’s conversion from a hydrocarbon to a carbohydrate fuel economy is rapidly leading to chaotic climate changes with a profoundly negative impact on the US economy, unquote, we’ve been told that Ellington is only concerned, not deeply concerned. Should we change that?’

‘No, we’re deeply concerned. He is too, he just doesn’t know it.’

‘Okay, then down in the third paragraph in the operative clauses, quote, the United States will peg hydrocarbon fuel reductions in a two-to-one ratio to such reductions by China and India, and will provide matching funds for all tidal and wind power plants built in those countries and in all countries that fall under a five in the UN’s prospering countries index, these plants to be operated by a joint powers agency that will include the United States as a permanent member; four, these provisions will combine with the climate-neutral power production –’

‘Wait, call that power generation.’

‘Power generation, okay, such that any savings in environmental mitigation in participating countries as determined by IPCC ratings will be credited equally to the US rating, and not less than fifty million dollars per year in savings is to be earmarked specifically for the construction of more such climate-neutral power plants; and not less than fifty million dollars per year in savings is to be earmarked specifically for the construction of so-called ‘carbon sinks’, meaning any environmental engineering project designed to capture and sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide safely, in forests, peat beds, oceans, or other locations –’

‘Yeah hey you know carbon sinks are so crucial, scrubbing CO₂ out of the air may eventually turn out to be our only option, so maybe we should reverse those two clauses. Make carbon sinks come first and the climate-neutral power plants second in that paragraph.’

‘You think?’

‘Yes. Definitely. Carbon sinks could be the only way that our kids, and about a thousand years’ worth of kids actually, can save themselves from living in Swamp World. From living their whole lives on Venus.’

‘Or should we say Washington DC.’

‘Please.’

‘Okay, those are flip-flopped then. So that’s that paragraph, now, hmm, that’s it for text. I guess the next question is, what can we offer Winston and his gang to get them to accept this version.’

‘Get Winston’s people to give you their list of riders, and then pick the two least offensive ones and tell them they’re the most we could get Phil to accept, but only if they accept our changes first.’

‘But will they go for that?’

‘No, but – wait – Joe?’

Charlie didn’t see Joe anywhere. He ducked to be able to see under the climbing structure to the other side. No Joe.

‘Hey Roy let me call you back okay? I gotta find Joe he’s wandered off.’

‘Okay, give me a buzz.’

Charlie clicked off and yanked the earplug out of his ear, jammed it in his pocket.

‘JOE!’

He looked around at the West Indian nannies – none of them were watching, none of them would meet his eye. No help there. He jogged south to be able to see farther around the back of the fire station. Ah ha! There was Joe, trundling full speed for Wisconsin Avenue.

‘JOE! STOP!’

That was as loud as Charlie could shout. He saw that Joe had indeed heard him, and had redoubled the speed of his diaper-waddle towards the busy street.

Charlie took off in a sprint after him. ‘JOE!’ he shouted as he pelted over the grass. ‘STOP! JOE! STOP RIGHT THERE!’ He didn’t believe that Joe would stop, but possibly he would try to go even faster, and fall.

No such luck. Joe was in stride now, running like a duck trying to escape something without taking flight. He was on the sidewalk next to the fire station, and had a clear shot at Wisconsin, where trucks and cars zipped by as always.

Charlie closed in, cleared the fire station, saw big trucks bearing down; if Joe catapulted off the kerb he would be right under their wheels. By the time Charlie caught up to him he was so close to the edge that Charlie had to grab him by the back of his shirt and lift him off his feet, whirling him around in a broad circle through the air, back onto Charlie as they both fell in a heap on the sidewalk.

‘Ow!’ Joe howled.

‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING!’ Charlie shouted in his face. ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DON’T EVER DO THAT AGAIN!’

Joe, amazed, stopped howling for a moment. He stared at his father, face crimson. Then he recommenced howling.

Charlie shifted into a crosslegged position, hefted the crying boy into his lap. He was shaking, his heart was pounding; he could feel it tripping away madly in his hands and chest. In an old reflex he put his thumb to the other wrist and watched the seconds pass on his watch for fifteen seconds. Multiply by four. Impossible. One hundred and eighty beats a minute. Surely that was impossible. Sweat was pouring out of all his skin at once. He was gasping.

The parade of trucks and cars continued to roar by, inches away. Wisconsin Avenue was a major truck route from the Beltway into the city. Most of the trucks entirely filled the right lane, from kerb to lane line; and most were moving at about forty miles an hour.

‘Why do you do that?’ Charlie whispered into his boy’s hair. Suddenly he was filled with fear, and some kind of dread or despair. ‘It’s just crazy.’

‘Ow,’ Joe said.

Big shuddering sighs racked them both.

Charlie’s phone rang. He clicked it on and held an earplug to his ear.

‘Hi love.’

‘Oh hi hon!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Oh nothing, nothing. I’ve just been chasing Joe around. We’re at the park.’

‘Wow, you must be cooking. Isn’t it the hottest part of the day?’

‘Yeah it is, almost, but we’ve been having fun so we stayed. We’re about to head back now.’

‘Okay, I won’t keep you. I just wanted to check if we had any plans for next weekend.’

‘None that I know of.’

‘Okay, good. Because I had an interesting thing happen this morning, I met a bunch of people downstairs, new to the building. They’re like Tibetans, I think, only they live on an island. They’ve taken the office space downstairs that the travel agency used to have.’

‘That’s nice dear.’

‘Yes. I’m going to have lunch with them, and if it seems like a good idea I might ask them over for dinner sometime, if you don’t mind.’

‘No, that’s fine, snooks. Whatever you like. It sounds interesting.’

‘Great, okay. I’m going to go meet them soon, I’ll tell you about it.’

‘Okay, good.’

‘Okay, bye dove.’

‘Bye love, talk to you.’

Charlie clicked off.

After ten giant breaths he stood, lifting Joe in his arms. Joe buried his face in Charlie’s neck. Shakily Charlie retraced their course. It was somewhere between fifty and a hundred yards. Rivulets of sweat ran down his ribs, and off his forehead into his eyes. He wiped them against Joe’s shirt. Joe was sweaty too. When he reached their stuff Charlie swung Joe around, down into his backpack. For once Joe did not resist. ‘Sowy Da,’ he said, and fell asleep as Charlie swung him onto his back.

Charlie took off walking. Joe’s head rested against his neck, a sensation that had always pleased him before. Sometimes he would even suckle the tendon there. Now it was like the touch of some meaning so great that he couldn’t bear it, a huge cloudy aura of danger and love. He started to cry, wiped his eyes and shook it off, as if shaking away a nightmare. Hostages to fortune, he thought. You get married, have kids, you give up such hostages to fortune. No avoiding it, no help for it. It’s just the price you pay for such love. His son was a complete maniac, and it only made him love him more.

He walked hard for most of an hour, through all the neighborhoods he had come to know so well in his years of lonely Mr Momhood. The vestiges of an older way of life lay under the trees like a network of ley lines: railway beds, canal systems, Indian trails, even deer trails, all could be discerned. Charlie walked them sightlessly. The ductile world drooped around him in the heat. Sweat lubricated his every move.

Slowly he regained his sense of normality. Just an ordinary day with Joe and Da.

The residential streets of Bethesda and Chevy Chase were in many ways quite beautiful. It had mostly to do with the immense trees, and the grass underfoot. Green everywhere. On a weekday afternoon like this there was almost no one to be seen. The slight hilliness was just right for walking. Tall old hardwoods gave some relief from the heat; above them the sky was an incandescent white. The trees were undoubtedly second or even third growth, there couldn’t be many old-growth hardwoods anywhere east of the Mississippi. Still they were old trees, and tall. Charlie had never shifted out of his California consciousness, in which open landscapes were the norm and the desire, so that on the one hand he found the omnipresent forest claustrophobic – he pined for a pineless view – while on the other hand it remained always exotic and compelling, even slightly ominous or spooky. The dapple of leaves at every level, from the ground to the highest canopy, was a perpetual revelation to him; nothing in his home ground or in his bookish sense of forests had prepared him for this vast and delicate venation of the air. On the other hand he longed for a view of distant mountains as if for oxygen itself. On this day especially he felt stifled and gasping.

His phone beeped again, and he pulled the earplugs out of his pocket and stuck them in his ears, clicked the set on.

‘Hello.’

‘Hey Charlie, I don’t want to bug you, but are you and Joe okay?’

‘Oh yeah, thanks Roy. Thanks for checking back in, I forgot to call you.’

‘So you found him.’

‘Yeah I found him, but I had to stop him running into traffic, and he was upset and I forgot to call back.’

‘Hey, that’s okay. It’s just that I was wondering, you know, if you could finish off this draft with me.’

‘I guess.’ Charlie sighed. ‘To tell the truth, Roy boy, I’m not so sure how well this work-at-home thing is going for me these days.’

‘Oh you’re doing fine. You’re Phil’s gold standard. But look, if now isn’t a good time …’

‘No no, Joe’s asleep on my back. It’s fine. I’m still just kind of freaked out.’

‘Sure, I can imagine. Listen we can do it later, although I must say we do need to get this thing staffed out soon or else Phil might get caught short. Dr Strangelove –’ this was their name for the President’s science advisor ‘– has been asking to see our draft too.’

‘I know, okay talk to me. I can tell you what I think anyway.’

So for a while as he walked he listened to Roy read sentences from his draft, and then discussed with him the whys and wherefores, and possible revisions. Roy had been Phil’s chief of staff ever since Wade Norton hit the road and became an advisor in absentia, and after years of staffing for the House Resources committee (called the Environment committee until the Gingrich Congress renamed it), he was deeply knowledgeable, and sharp too; one of Charlie’s favourite people. And Charlie himself was so steeped now in the climate bill that he could see it all in his head, indeed it helped him now just to hear it, without the print before him to distract him. As if someone were telling him a bedtime story.

Eventually, however, some question of Roy’s couldn’t be resolved without the text before him. ‘Sorry. I’ll call you back when I get home.’

‘Okay but don’t forget, we need to get this finished.’

‘I won’t.’

They clicked off.

His walk home took him south, down the west edge of the Bethesda Metro district, an urban neighbourhood of restaurants and apartment blocks, all ringing the hole in the ground out of which people and money fountained so prodigiously, changing everything: streets rerouted, neighbourhoods redeveloped, a whole clutch of skyscrapers bursting up through the canopy and establishing another purely urban zone in the endless hardwood forest.

He stopped in at Second Story Books, the biggest and best of the area’s several used bookstores. It was a matter of habit only; he had visited it so often with Joe asleep on his back that he had memorized the stock, and was reduced to checking the hidden books in the inner rows, or alphabetizing sections that he liked. No one in the supremely arrogant and slovenly shop cared what he did there. It was soothing in that sense.

Finally he gave up trying to pretend he felt normal, and walked past the auto dealer and home. There it was a tough call whether to take the baby backpack off and hope not to wake Joe prematurely, or just to keep him on his back and work from the bench he had put by his desk for this very purpose. The discomfort of Joe’s weight was more than compensated for by the quiet, and so as usual he kept Joe snoozing on his back.

When he had his material open, and had read up on tidal power generation cost/benefit figures from the UN study on same, he called Roy back, and they got the job finished. The revised draft was ready for Phil to review, and in a pinch could be shown to Senator Winston or Dr Strangelove.

‘Thanks Charlie. That looks good.’

‘I like it too. It’ll be interesting to see what Phil says about it. I wonder if we’re hanging him too far out there.’

‘I think he’ll be okay, but I wonder what Winston’s staff will say.’

‘They’ll have a cow.’

‘It’s true. They’re worse than Winston himself. A bunch of Sir Humphreys if I ever saw one.’

‘I don’t know, I think they’re just fundamentalist know-nothings.’

‘True, but we’ll show them.’

‘I hope.’

‘Charles my man, you’re sounding tired. I suppose the Joe is about to wake up.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Unrelenting eh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But you are the man, you are the greatest Mr Mom inside the Beltway!’

Charlie laughed. ‘And all that competition.’

Roy laughed too, pleased to be able to cheer Charlie up. ‘Well it’s an accomplishment anyway.’

‘That’s nice of you to say. Most people don’t notice. It’s just something weird that I do.’

‘Well that’s true too. But people don’t know what it entails.’

‘No they don’t. The only ones who know are real moms, but they don’t think I count.’

‘You’d think they’d be the ones who would.’

‘Well, in a way they’re right. There’s no reason me doing it should be anything special. It may just be me wanting some strokes. It’s turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. A real psychic shock.’

‘Because …’

‘Well, I was thirty-eight when Nick arrived, and I had been doing exactly what I wanted ever since I was eighteen. Twenty years of white male American freedom, just like what you have, young man, and then Nick arrived and suddenly I was at the command of a speechless mad tyrant. I mean, think about it. Tonight you can go wherever you want to, go out and have some fun, right?’

‘That’s right, I’m going to go to a party for some new folks at Brookings, supposed to be wild.’

‘All right, don’t rub it in. Because I’m going to be in the same room I’ve been in every night for the past seven years, more or less.’

‘So by now you’re used to it, right?’

‘Well, yes. That’s true. It was harder with Nick, when I could remember what freedom was.’

‘You have morphed into momhood.’

‘Yeah. But morphing hurts, baby, just like in The X-Men. I remember the first Mother’s Day after Nick was born, I was most deep into the shock of it, and Anna had to be away that day, maybe to visit her mom, I can’t remember, and I was trying to get Nick to take a bottle and he was refusing it as usual. And I suddenly realized I would never be free again for the whole rest of my life, but that as a non-Mom I was never going to get a day to honour my efforts, because Father’s Day is not what this stuff is about, and Nick was whipping his head around even though he was in desperate need of a bottle, and I freaked out, Roy. I freaked out and threw that bottle down.’

‘You threw it?’

‘Yeah, I slung it down and it hit at the wrong angle or something and just exploded. The baggie broke and the milk shot up and sprayed all over the room. I couldn’t believe one bottle could hold that much. Even now when I’m cleaning the living room I come across little white dots of dried milk here and there, like on the mantelpiece or the windowsill. Another little reminder of my Mother’s Day freak-out.’

‘Ha. The morph moment. Well Charlie, you are indeed a pathetic specimen of American manhood, yearning for your own Mother’s Day card, but just hang in there – only seventeen more years and you’ll be free again!’

‘Oh fuckyouverymuch! By then I won’t want to be.’

‘Even now you don’t wanna be. You love it, you know you do. But listen I gotta go Phil’s here bye.’

‘Bye.’

After talking with Charlie, Anna got absorbed in work in her usual manner, and might well have forgotten her lunch date with the people from Khembalung; but because this was a perpetual problem of hers, she had set her watch alarm for one o’clock, and when it beeped she saved and went downstairs. She could see through the front window that the new embassy’s staff was still unpacking, releasing visible clouds of dust or incense smoke into the air. The young monk she had spoken to and his most elderly companion sat on the floor inspecting a box containing necklaces and the like.

They noticed her and looked up curiously, then the younger one nodded, remembering her from the morning conversation after their ceremony.

‘Still interested in some pizza?’ Anna asked. ‘If pizza is okay?’

‘Oh yes,’ the young one said. The two men got to their feet, the old man in several distinct moves; one leg was stiff. ‘We love pizza.’ The old man nodded politely, glancing at his young assistant, who said something to him rapidly, in a language that while not guttural did seem mostly to be generated at the back of the mouth.

As they crossed the atrium to Pizzeria Uno Anna said uncertainly, ‘Do you eat pizza where you come from?’

The younger man smiled. ‘No. But in Nepal I have eaten pizza in tea houses.’

‘Are you vegetarian?’

‘No. Tibetan Buddhism has never been vegetarian. There were not enough vegetables.’

‘So you are Tibetans! But I thought you said you were an island nation?’

‘We are. But originally we came from Tibet. The old ones, like Rudra Cakrin here, left when the Chinese took over. The rest of us were born in India, or on Khembalung itself.’

‘I see.’

They entered the restaurant, where big booths were walled by high wooden partitions. The three of them sat in one, Anna across from the two men.

‘I am Drepung,’ the young man said, ‘and the rimpoche here, our ambassador to America, is Gyatso Sonam Rudra Cakrin.’

‘I’m Anna Quibler,’ Anna said, and shook hands with each of them. The men’s hands were heavily callused.

Their waiter appeared. She did not appear to notice the unusual garb of the men, but took their orders with sublime indifference. After a quick muttered consultation, Drepung asked Anna for suggestions, and in the end they ordered a combination pizza with everything on it.

Anna sipped her water. ‘Tell me more about Khembalung, and about your new embassy.’

Drepung nodded. ‘I wish Rudra Cakrin himself could tell you, but he is still taking his English lessons, I’m afraid. Apparently they are going very badly. In any case, you know that China invaded Tibet in 1950, and that the Dalai Lama escaped to India in 1959?’

‘Yes, that sounds familiar.’

‘Yes. And during those years, and ever since then too, many Tibetans have moved to India to get away from the Chinese, and closer to the Dalai Lama. India took us in very hospitably, but when the Chinese and Indian governments had their disagreement over their border in 1960, the situation became very awkward for India. They were already in a bad way with Pakistan, and a serious controversy with China would have been …’ He searched for the word, waggling a hand.

‘Too much?’ Anna suggested.

‘Yes. Much too much. So, the support India had been giving to the Tibetans in exile –’

Rudra Cakrin made a little hiss.

‘Small to begin with, although very helpful nevertheless,’ Drepung added, ‘shrank even further. It was requested that the Tibetan community in Dharamsala make itself as small and inconspicuous as possible. The Dalai Lama and his government did their best, and many Tibetans were relocated to other places in India, mostly in the far south. But elsewhere as well. Then some more years passed, and there were some, how shall I say, arguments or splits within the Tibetan exile community, too complicated to go into, I assure you. I can hardly understand them myself. But in the end a group called the Yellow Hat School took the offer of this island of ours, and moved there. This was just before the India – Pakistan war of 1970, unfortunately, so the timing was bad, and everything was on the hush-hush for a time. But the island was ours from that point, as a kind of protectorate of India, like Sikkim, only not so formally arranged.’

‘Is Khembalung the island’s original name?’

‘No. I do not think it had a name before. Most of our sect lived at one time or another in the valley of Khembalung. So that name was kept, and we have shifted away from the Dalai Lama’s government in Dharamsala, to a certain extent.’

At the sound of the words ‘Dalai Lama’ the old monk made a face and said something in Tibetan.

‘The Dalai Lama is still number one with us,’ Drepung clarified. ‘It is a matter of some religious controversies with his associates. A matter of how best to support him.’

Anna said, ‘I thought the mouth of the Ganges was in Bangladesh?’

‘Much of it is. But you must know that it is a very big delta, and the west side of it is in India. Part of Bengal. Many islands. The Sundarbans? You have not heard?’

Their pizzas arrived, and Drepung began talking between big bites. ‘Lightly populated islands, the Sundarbans. Some of them anyway. Ours was uninhabited.’

‘Did you say uninhabitable?’

‘No no. Inhabitable, obviously.’

Another noise from Rudra Cakrin.

‘People with lots of choices might say they were uninhabitable,’ Drepung went on. ‘And they may yet become so. They are best for tigers. But we have done well there. We have become like tigers. Over the years we have built a nice town. A little seaside potala for Gyatso Rudra and the other lamas. Schools, houses – hospital. All that. And sea walls. The whole island has been ringed by dykes. Lots of work. Hard labour.’ He nodded as if personally acquainted with this work. ‘Dutch advisors helped us. Very nice. Our home, you know? Khembalung has moved from age to age. But now …’ He waggled a hand again, took another slice of pizza, bit into it.

‘Global warming?’ Anna ventured.

He nodded, swallowed. ‘Our Dutch friends suggested that we establish an embassy here, to join their campaign to influence American policy in these matters.’

Anna quickly bit into her pizza, so that she would not reveal the thought that had struck her, that the Dutch must be desperate indeed if they had been reduced to help like this. She thought things over as she chewed. ‘So here you are,’ she said. ‘Have you been to America before?’

Drepung shook his head. ‘None of us have.’

‘It must be pretty overwhelming.’

He frowned at this word. ‘I have been to Calcutta.’

‘Oh I see.’

‘This is very different, of course.’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

She liked him: his musical Indian English, his round face and big liquid eyes, his ready smile. The two men made quite a contrast: Drepung young and tall, round-faced, with a kind of baby-fat look; Rudra Cakrin old, small and wizened, his face lined with a million wrinkles, his cheekbones and narrow jaw prominent in an angular, nearly fleshless face.

The wrinkles were laugh lines, however, combined with the lines of a wide-eyed expression of surprise that bunched up his forehead. Despite his noises and muttering under Drepung’s account, he still seemed cheerful enough. He certainly attacked his pizza with the same enthusiasm as his young assistant. With their shaved heads they shared a certain family resemblance.

She said, ‘I suppose going from Tibet to a tropical island must have been a bigger shock than coming from the island to here.’

‘I suppose. I was born in Khembalung myself, so I don’t know for sure. But the old ones like Rudra here, who made that very move, seem to have adjusted quite well. Just to have any kind of home is a blessing, I think you will find.’

Anna nodded. The two of them did project a certain calm. They sat in the booth as if there was no hurry to go anywhere else. Anna couldn’t imagine any such state of mind. She was always in a tearing hurry. She tried to match their air of being at ease. At ease in Arlington, Virginia, after a lifetime on an island in the Ganges. Well, the climate would be familiar. But everything else had to have changed quite stupendously.

And, on closer examination, there was a certain guardedness to them. Drepung glanced surreptitiously at their waiter; he looked at the pedestrians passing by; he watched Anna herself, all with a slightly cautious look, reminding her of the pained expression she had seen earlier in the day.

‘How is it that you came to rent a space in this particular building?’

Drepung paused and considered this question for a surprisingly long time. Rudra Cakrin asked him something and he replied, and Rudra said something more.

‘We had some advice there also,’ Drepung said. ‘The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has been helping us, and their office is located on Wilson Boulevard, nearby.’

‘I didn’t know that. They’ve helped you to meet people?’

‘Yes, with the Dutch, and with some island nations, like Fiji and Tuvalu.’

‘Tuvalu?’

‘A very small country in the Pacific. They have perhaps been less than helpful to the cause, telling people that sea level has risen in their area of the Pacific but not elsewhere, and asking for financial compensation for this from Australia and other countries.’

‘In their area of the Pacific only?’

‘Measurements have not confirmed the claim.’ Drepung smiled. ‘But I can assure you, if you are on a storm track and spring tides are upon you, it can seem like sea level has risen quite a great deal.’

‘I’m sure.’

Anna thought it over while she ate. It was good to know that they hadn’t just rented the first office they found vacant. Nevertheless, their effort in Washington looked to her to be underpowered at this point. ‘You should meet my husband,’ she said. ‘He works for a senator, one who is up on all these things, a very helpful guy, the chair of the foreign relations committee.’

‘Ah – Senator Chase?’

‘Yes. You know about him?’

‘He has visited Khembalung.’

‘Has he? Well, I’m not surprised, he’s been every – he’s been a lot of places. Anyway, my husband Charlie works for him as an environmental policy advisor. It would be good for you to talk to Charlie and get his perspective on your situation. He’ll be full of suggestions for things you could do.’

‘That would be an honour.’

‘I don’t know if I’d go that far. But useful.’

‘Useful, yes. Perhaps we could have you to dinner at our residence.’

‘Thank you, that would be nice. But we have two small boys and we’ve lost all our baby-sitters, so to tell the truth it would be easier if you and some of your colleagues came to our place. In fact I’ve already talked to Charlie about this, and he’s looking forward to meeting you. We live in Bethesda, just across the border from the District. It’s not far.’

‘Red line.’

‘Yes, very good. Red line, Bethesda stop. I can give you directions from there.’

She got out her calendar, checked the coming weeks. Very full, as always. ‘How about a week from Friday? On a Friday we’ll be able to relax a little.’

‘Thank you,’ Drepung said, ducking his head. He and Rudra Cakrin had an exchange in Tibetan. ‘That would be very kind. And on the full moon, too.’

‘Is it? I’m afraid I don’t keep track.’

‘We do. The tides, you see.’

THREE Intellectual Merit

Water flows through the oceans in steady recycling patterns, determined by the Coriolis force and the particular positions of the continents in our time. Surface currents can move in the opposite direction to bottom currents below them, and often do, forming systems like giant conveyor belts of water. The largest one is already famous, at least in part: the Gulf Stream is a segment of a warm surface current that flows north up the entire length of the Atlantic, all the way to Norway and Greenland. There the water cools and sinks, and begins a long journey south on the Atlantic ocean floor, to the Cape of Good Hope and then east towards Australia, and even into the Pacific, where the water upwells and rejoins the surface flow, west to the Atlantic for the long haul north again. The round trip for any given water molecule takes about a thousand years.

Cooling salty water sinks more easily than fresh water. Trade winds sweep clouds generated in the Gulf of Mexico west over Central America to dump their rain in the Pacific, leaving the remaining water in the Atlantic that much saltier. So the cooling water in the North Atlantic sinks well, aiding the power of the Gulf Stream. If the surface of the North Atlantic were to become rapidly fresher, it would not sink so well when it cooled, and that could stall the conveyor belt. The Gulf Stream would have nowhere to go, and would slow down, and sink farther south. Weather everywhere would change, becoming windier and drier in the northern hemisphere, and colder in places, especially in Europe.

The sudden desalination of the North Atlantic might seem an unlikely occurrence, but it has happened before. At the end of the last Ice Age, for instance, vast shallow lakes were created by the melting of the polar ice cap. Eventually these lakes broke through their ice dams and poured off into the oceans. The Canadian shield still sports the scars from three or four of these cataclysmic floods; one flowed down the Mississippi, one the Hudson, one the St Lawrence.

These flows apparently stalled the world ocean conveyor belt current, and the climate of the whole world changed as a result, sometimes in as little as three years.

Now, would the Arctic sea ice, breaking into bergs and flowing south past Greenland, dump enough fresh water into the North Atlantic to stall the Gulf Stream again?

Frank Vanderwal kept track of climate news as a sort of morbid hobby. His friend Kenzo Hayakawa, an old climbing partner and grad school housemate, had spent time at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration before coming to NSF to work with the weather crowd on the ninth floor, and so Frank occasionally checked in with him, to say hi and find out the latest. Things were getting wild out there; extreme weather events were touching down all over the world, the violent, short-termed ones almost daily, the chronic problem situations piling one on the next, so that never were they entirely clear of one or another of them. The Hyperniño, severe drought in India and Peru, lightning fires perpetual in Malaysia; then on the daily scale, a typhoon destroying most of Mindanao, a snap freeze killing crops and breaking pipes all over Texas, and so on. Something every day.

Like a lot of climatologists and other weather people Frank had met, Kenzo presented all this news with a faintly proprietarial air, as if he were curating the weather. He liked the wild stuff, and enjoyed sharing news of it, especially if it seemed to support his contention that the heat added anthropogenically to the atmosphere had been enough to change the Indian Ocean monsoon patterns for good, triggering global repercussions; this meant, in practice, almost everything that happened. This week for instance it was tornadoes, previously confined almost entirely to North America, as a kind of freak of that continent’s topography and latitude, but now appearing in east Africa and in central Asia. Last week it had been the weakening of the Great World Ocean Current in the Indian Ocean rather than the Atlantic.

‘Unbelievable,’ Frank would say.

‘I know. Isn’t it great?’

Before leaving for home at the end of the day, Frank often passed by another source of news, the little room filled with file cabinets and copy machines informally called ‘The Department of Unfortunate Statistics’. Someone had started to tape on the beige walls of this room extra copies of pages that held interesting statistics or other bits of recent quantitative information. No one knew who had started the tradition, but now it was clearly a communal thing.

The oldest ones were headlines, things like:

World Bank President Says Four Billion Live on Less Than Two Dollars a Day

or

America: Five Percent of World Population, Fifty Percent of Corporate Ownership

Later pages were charts, or tables of figures out of journal articles, or short articles of a quantitative nature out of the scientific literature.

When Frank went by on this day, Edgardo was in there at the coffee machine, as he so often was, looking at the latest. It was another headline:

352 Richest People Own As Much as the Poorest Two Billion, Says Canadian Food Project

‘I don’t think this can be right,’ Edgardo declared.

‘How so?’ Frank said.

‘Because the poorest two billion have nothing, whereas the richest three hundred and fifty-two have a big percentage of the world’s total capital. I suspect it would take the poorest four billion at least to match the top three hundred and fifty.’

Anna came in as he was saying this, and wrinkled her nose as she went to the copying machine. She didn’t like this kind of conversation, Frank knew. It seemed to be a matter of distaste for belabouring the obvious. Or distrust in the data. Maybe she was the one who had taped up a brief quote, ‘72.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot.’

Frank, wanting to bug her, said, ‘What do you think, Anna?’

‘About what?’

Edgardo pointed to the headline and explained his objection.

Anna said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe if you add two billion small households up, it matches the richest three hundred.’

‘Not this top three hundred. Have you seen the latest Forbes 500 reports?’

Anna shook her head impatiently, as if to say, Of course not, why would I waste my time? But Edgardo was an inveterate student of the stock market and the financial world generally. He tapped another taped-up page. ‘The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.’

Anna said, ‘I wonder how they define surplus value.’

‘Profit,’ Frank said.

Edgardo shook his head. ‘You can cook the books and get rid of profit, but the surplus value, the value created beyond the pay for the labour, is still there.’

Anna said, ‘There was a page in here that said the average American worker puts in 1950 hours a year. I thought that was questionable too, that’s forty hours a week for about forty-nine weeks.’

‘Three weeks of vacation a year,’ Frank pointed out. ‘Pretty normal.’

‘Yeah, but that’s the average? What about all the part-time workers?’

‘There must be an equivalent number of people who work overtime.’

‘Can that be true? I thought overtime was a thing of the past.’

‘You work overtime.’

‘Yeah but I don’t get paid for it.’

The men laughed at her.

‘They should have used the median,’ she said. ‘The average is a skewed measure of central tendency. Anyway, that’s …’ – Anna could do calculations in her head – ‘sixty-four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value. If you can believe these figures.’

‘What’s the average income?’ Edgardo asked. ‘Thirty thousand?’

‘Maybe less,’ Frank said.

‘We don’t have any idea,’ Anna objected.

‘Call it thirty, and what’s the average taxes paid?’

‘About ten? Or is it less?’

Edgardo said, ‘Call it ten. So let’s see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two thirds, and gives you one third, and you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it takes to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party.’ He grinned at Frank and Anna. ‘How stupid is that?’

Anna shook her head. ‘People don’t see it that way.’

‘But here are the statistics!’

‘People don’t usually put them together like that. Besides, you made half of them up.’

‘They’re close enough for people to get the idea! But they are not taught to think! In fact they’re taught not to think. And they are stupid to begin with.’

Even Frank was not willing to go this far. ‘It’s a matter of what you can see,’ he suggested. ‘You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it’s given to you. You have it. Then you’re forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you’ve created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books.’

‘But the rich are all over the news! Everyone can see they have more than they have earned, because no one earns that much.’

‘The only things people understand are sensory,’ Frank insisted. ‘We’re hardwired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts like surplus value, or statistics on the value of a year’s work, these just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.’

‘That’s what I’m saying,’ Edgardo said cheerfully. ‘We are stupid!’

‘I’ve got to get back to it,’ Anna said, and left. It really wasn’t her kind of conversation.

Frank followed her out, and finally headed home. He drove his little fuel-cell Honda out along Old Dominion Parkway, already jammed; over the Beltway, and then up to a condo complex called Swink’s New Mill, where he had rented a condominium for his year at NSF.

He parked in the complex’s cellar garage and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. His apartment looked out towards the Potomac – a long view and a nice apartment, rented out for the year from a young State Department guy who was doing a stint in Brasilia. It was furnished in a stripped-down style that suggested the man did not live there very often. But a nice kitchen, functional spaces, everything easy, and most of the time Frank was home he was asleep anyway, so he didn’t care what it was like.

He had picked up one of the free papers back at work, and now as he spooned down some cottage cheese he looked again at the Personals section, a regrettable habit he had had for years, fascinated as he was by the glimpse these pages gave of a subworld of radically efflorescing sexual diversity – a subculture that had understood the implications of the removal of biological constraints in the techno-urban landscape, and were therefore able and willing to create a kind of polymorphous panmixia. Were these people really out there, or was this merely the collective fantasy life of a bunch of lonely souls like himself? He had never contacted any of the people putting in the ads to try to find out. He suspected the worst, and would rather be lonely. Although the sections devoted to people looking for LTRs, meaning ‘long-term relationships’, went far beyond the sexual fantasies, and sometimes struck him with force. ISO LTR: in search of long-term relationship. The species had long ago evolved towards monogamous relationships, they were wired into the brain’s structure, every culture manifesting the same overwhelming tendency toward pair bonding. Not a cultural imposition but a biological instinct. They might as well be storks in that regard.

And so he read the ads, but never replied. He was only here for a year; San Diego was his home. It made no sense to take any action on this particular front, no matter what he felt or read.

The ads themselves also tended to stop him.

Husband hunting, SWF, licensed nurse, seeks a hardworking, handsome SWM for LTR. Must be a dedicated Jehovah’s Witness.

SBM, 5’5”, shy, quiet, a little bit serious, seeking Woman, age open. Not good-looking or wealthy but Nice Guy. Enjoy foreign movies, opera, theater, music, books, quiet evenings.

These entries were not going to get a lot of responses. But they, like all the rest, were as clear as could be on the fundamental primate needs they were asking for. Frank could have written the urtext underneath them, and one time he had, and had even sent it in to a paper, as a joke of course, for all those reading these confessions with the same analytical slant he had – it would make them laugh. Although of course if any woman reading it liked the joke well enough to call, well, that would have been a sign.

Male homo sapiens desires company of female homo sapiens for mutual talk and grooming behavior, possibly mating and reproduction. Must be happy, run fast.

But no one had replied.

He went out onto the bas-relief balcony, into the sultry late afternoon. Another two months and he would be going home, back to resume his real life. He was looking forward to it. He wanted to float in the Pacific. He wanted to walk around beautiful UCSD in its cool warmth, eat lunch with old colleagues among the eucalyptus trees.

Thinking about that reminded him of the grant application from Yann Pierzinski. He went inside to his laptop and googled him to try to learn more about what he had been up to. Then he re-opened his application, and found the section on the part of the algorithm to be developed. Primitive recursion at the boundary limit … it was interesting.

After some more thought, he called up Derek Gaspar at Torrey Pines Generique.

‘What’s up?’ Derek said after the preliminaries.

‘Well, I just got a grant proposal from one of your people, and I’m wondering if you can tell me anything about it.’

‘From one of mine, what do you mean?’

‘A Yann Pierzinski, do you know him?’

‘No, never heard of him. He works here you say?’

‘He was there on a temporary contract, working with Simpson. He’s a post-doc from Caltech.’

‘Ah yeah, here we go. Mathematician, got a paper in Biomathematics on algorithms.’

‘Yeah, that comes up first on my google too.’

‘Well sure. I can’t be expected to know everyone who ever worked with us here, that’s hundreds of people, you know that.’

‘Sure sure.’

‘So what’s his proposal about? Are you going to give him a grant?’

‘Not up to me, you know that. We’ll see what the panel says. But meanwhile, maybe you should check it out.’

‘Oh you like it then?’

‘I think it may be interesting, it’s hard to tell at this stage. Just don’t drop him.’

‘Well, our records show him as already gone back up to Pasadena, to finish his work up there I presume. Like you said, his gig here was temporary.’

‘Ah ha. Man, your research groups have been gutted.’

‘Not gutted, Frank, we’re down to the bare bones in some areas, but we’ve kept what we need to. There have been some hard choices to make. Kenton wanted his note repaid, and the timing couldn’t have been worse, coming after that stage two in India. It’s been tough, really tough. That’s one of the reasons I’ll be happy when you’re back out here.’

‘I don’t work for Torrey Pines any more.’

‘No I know, but maybe you could rejoin us when you move back here.’

‘Maybe. If you get new financing.’

‘I’m trying, believe me. That’s why I’d like to have you back on board.’

‘We’ll see. Let’s talk about it when I’m out there. Meanwhile, don’t cut any more of your other research efforts. They might be what draws the new financing.’

‘I hope so. I’m doing what I can, believe me. We’re trying to hold on till something comes through.’

‘Yeah. Hang in there then. I’ll be out looking for a place to live in a couple of weeks, I’ll come see you then.’

‘Good, make an appointment with Susan.’

Frank clicked off his phone, sat back in his chair thinking it over. Derek was like a lot of first-generation CEOs of biotech start-ups. He had come out of the biology department at UCSD, and his business acumen had been gained on the job. Some people managed to do this successfully, others didn’t, but all tended to fall behind on the actual science being done, and had to take on faith what was really possible in the labs. Certainly Derek could use some help in guiding policy at Torrey Pines Generique.

Frank went back to studying the grant proposal. There were elements of the algorithm missing, as was typical. That was what the grant was for, to pay for the work that would finish the project. And some people made a habit of describing crucial aspects of their work in general terms when at the pre-pub stage, a matter of being cautious. So he could not be sure about it, but he could see the potential for a very powerful method there. Earlier in the day he had thought he saw a way to plug one of the gaps that Pierzinski had left, and if that worked as he thought it might …

‘Hmmmm,’ he said to the empty room.

If the situation was still fluid when he went out to San Diego, he could perhaps set things up quite nicely. There were some potential problems, of course. NSF’s guidelines stated explicitly that although any copyrights, patents or project income belonged to the grant-holder, NSF always kept a public-right use for all grant-subsidized work. That would keep any big gains from being made by any individual or company on a project like this, if it was awarded a grant. Purely private control could only be maintained if there had not been any public money granted.

Also, the PI on the proposal was Pierzinski’s advisor at Caltech, battening off the work of his students in the usual way. Of course it was an exchange – the advisor gave the student credibility, and a licence to apply for a grant, by contributing his name and prestige to the project. The student provided the work, sometimes all of it, sometimes just a portion of it. In this case, it looked to Frank like all of it.

Anyway, the grant proposal came from Caltech. Caltech and the PI would hold the rights to anything the project made, along with NSF itself, even if Pierzinski moved afterwards. So, if for instance an effort was going to be made to bring Pierzinski to Torry Pines Generique, it would be best if this particular proposal were to be declined. And if the algorithm worked and became patentable, then again, keeping control of what it made would only be possible if the proposal were to be declined.

That line of thought made him feel jumpy. In fact he was on his feet, pacing out to the mini-balcony and back in again. Then he remembered he had been planning to go out to Great Falls anyway. He quickly finished his cottage cheese, pulled his climbing kit out of the closet, changed clothes, and went back down to his car.

The Great Falls of the Potomac was a complicated thing, a long tumble of whitewater falling down past a few islands. The complexity of the falls was its main visual appeal, as it was no very great thing in terms of total height, or even volume of water. Its roar was the biggest thing about it.

The spray it threw up seemed to consolidate and knock down the humidity, so that paradoxically it was less humid here than elsewhere, although wet and mossy underfoot. Frank walked downstream along the edge of the gorge. Below the falls the river recollected itself and ran through a defile called Mather Gorge, a ravine with a south wall so steep that climbers were drawn to it. One section called Carter Rock was Frank’s favourite. It was a simple matter to tie a rope to a top belay, usually a stout tree trunk near the cliff’s edge, and then abseil down the rope to the bottom and either free-climb up, or clip onto the rope with an ascender and go through the hassles of self-belay.

One could climb in teams too, of course, and many did, but there were about as many singletons like Frank here as there were duets. Some even free soloed the wall, dispensing with all protection. Frank liked to play it just a little safer than that, but he had climbed here so many times now that sometimes he abseiled down and free-climbed next to his rope, pretending to himself that he could grab it if he fell. The few routes available were all chalked and greasy from repeated use. He decided this time to clip onto the rope with the ascender.

The river and its gorge created a band of open sky that was unusually big for the metropolitan area. This as much as anything else gave Frank the feeling that he was in a good place: on a wall route, near water, and open to the sky. Out of the claustrophobia of the great hardwood forest, one of the things about the East Coast that Frank hated the most. There were times he would have given a finger for the sight of open land.

Now, as he abseiled down to the small tumble of big boulders at the foot of the cliff, chalked his hands, and began to climb the fine-grained old schist of the route, he cheered up. He focused on his immediate surroundings to a degree unimaginable when he was not climbing. It was like the maths work, only then he wasn’t anywhere at all. Here, he was right on these very particular rocks.

This route he had climbed before many times. About a 5.8 or 5.9 at its crux, much easier elsewhere. Hard to find really difficult pitches here, but that didn’t matter. Even climbing up out of a ravine, rather than up onto a peak, didn’t matter. The constant roar, the spray, those didn’t matter. Only the climbing itself mattered.

His legs did most of the work. Find the footholds, fit his rockclimbing shoes into cracks or onto knobs, then look for handholds; and up, and up again, using his hands only for balance, and a kind of tactile reassurance that he was seeing what he was seeing, that the footholds he was expecting to use would be enough. Climbing was the bliss of perfect attention, a kind of devotion, or prayer. Or simply a retreat into the supreme competencies of the primate cerebellum. A lot was conserved.

By now it was evening. A sultry summer evening, sunset near, the air itself going yellow. He topped out and sat on the rim, feeling the sweat on his face fail to evaporate.

There was a kayaker, below in the river. A woman, he thought, though she wore a helmet and was broad-shouldered and flat-chested – he would have been hard-pressed to say exactly how he knew, and yet he was sure. This was another savannah competency, and indeed some anthropologists postulated that this kind of rapid identification of reproductive possibility was what the enlarged neocortex had grown to do. The brain growing with such evolutionary speed, specifically to get along with the other sex. A depressing thought given the results so far.

This woman was paddling smoothly upstream, into the hissing water that only around her seemed to be recollecting itself as a liquid. Upstream it was a steep rapids, leading to the white smash at the bottom of the falls proper.

The kayaker pushed up into this wilder section, paddling harder upstream, then held her position against the flow while she studied the falls ahead. Then she took off hard, attacking a white smooth flow in the lowest section, a kind of ramp through the smash, up to a terrace in the whitewater. When she reached the little flat she could rest again, in another slightly more strenuous maintenance paddle, gathering her strength for the next salmonlike climb.

Abruptly leaving the strange refuge of that flat spot, she attacked another ramp that led up to a bigger plateau of flat black water, a pool that had an eddy in it, apparently, rolling backward and allowing her to rest in place. There was no room there to gain any speed for another leap up, so that she appeared to be stuck; but maybe she was only studying her way, or waiting for a moment of reduced flow, because all of a sudden she attacked the water with a fierce flurry of paddle strokes, and seemingly willed her craft up the next pouring ramp. Five or seven desperate seconds later she levelled out again, on a tiny little bench of a refuge that did not have a pushback eddy, judging by the intensity of her maintenance paddling there. After only a few seconds she had to try a ramp to her right or get pushed back off her perch, and so she took off and fought upstream, fists moving fast as a boxer’s, the kayak at an impossible angle, looking like a miracle – until all of sudden it was swept back down, and she had to make a quick turn and then take a wild ride, bouncing down the falls by a different and steeper route than the one she had ascended, losing in a few swift seconds the height that she had taken a minute or two’s hard labour to gain.

‘Wow,’ Frank said, smitten.

She was already almost down to the hissing tapestry of flat river right below him, and he felt an urge to wave to her, or stand and applaud. He restrained himself, not wanting to impose upon another athlete obviously deep in her own space. But he did whip out his cell phone and try out a GPS-oriented directory search, figuring that if she had a cell phone with a transponder in the kayak, it had to be very close to his own phone’s position. He checked his position, entered thirty metres north of that; got nothing. Same with the position twenty metres farther east.

‘Ah well,’ he said, and stood to go. It was sunset now, and the smooth stretches of the river had turned a pale orange. Time to go home and try to fall asleep.

‘In search of kayaker gal, seen going upstream at Great Falls. Great ride, I love you, please respond.’

He would not send that in to the free papers, but only spoke it as a kind of prayer to the sunset. Down below the kayaker was turning to start upstream again.

It could be said that science is boring, or even that science wants to be boring, in that it wants to be beyond all dispute. It wants to understand the phenomena of the world in ways that everyone can agree on and share; it wants to make assertions from a position that is not any particular subject’s position, assertions that if tested for accuracy by any sentient being would cause that being to agree with the assertions. Complete agreement; the world put under a description – stated that way, it begins to sound interesting.

And indeed it is. Nothing human is boring. Nevertheless, the minute details of the everyday grind involved in any particular bit of scientific practice can be tedious even to the practitioners. A lot of it, as with most work in this world, involves wasted time, false leads, dead ends, faulty equipment, dubious techniques, bad data, and a huge amount of detail work. Only when it is written up in a paper does it tell a tale of things going right, step by step, in meticulous and replicable detail, like a proof in Euclid. That stage is a highly artificial result of a long process of grinding.

In the case of Leo and his lab, and the matter of the new targeted non-viral delivery system from Maryland, several hundred hours of human labour, and many more of computer time, were devoted to an attempted repetition of an experiment described in the crucial paper, ‘In Vivo Insertion of cDNA 1568rr Into CBA/H, BALB/c, and C57BL/6 Mice’.

At the end of this process, Leo had confirmed the theory he had formulated the very moment he had read the paper describing the experiment.

‘It’s a goddamned artifact.’

Marta and Brian sat there staring at the print-outs. Marta had killed a couple hundred of the Jackson Lab’s finest mice in the course of confirming this theory of Leo’s, and now she was looking more murderous than ever. You didn’t want to mess with Marta on the days when she had to sacrifice some mice, nor even talk to her.

Brian sighed.

Leo said, ‘It only works if you pump the mice full of the stuff till they just about explode. I mean look at them. They look like hamsters. Or guinea pigs. Their little eyes are about to pop out of their heads.’

‘No wonder,’ Brian said. ‘There’s only two millilitres of blood in a mouse, and we’re injecting them with one.’

Leo shook his head. ‘How the hell did they get away with that?’

‘The CBAs are kind of round and furry.’

‘What are you saying, they’re bred to hide artifacts?’

‘No.’

‘It’s an artifact!’

‘Well, it’s useless, anyway.’

An artifact was what they called an experimental result that was specific to the methodology of the experiment, but not illustrating anything beyond that. A kind of accident or false result, and in a few celebrated cases, part of a deliberate hoax.

So Brian was trying to be careful using the word. It was possible that it was no worse than a real result that happened to be generated in a way that made it useless for their particular purposes. Trying to turn things that people have learned about biological processes into medicines led to that sort of thing. It happened all the time, and all those experimental results were not necessarily artifacts. They just weren’t useful facts.

Not yet, anyway. That’s why there were so many experiments, and so many stages to the human trials that had to be so carefully conducted; so many double-blind studies, held with as many patients as possible included, to get good statistical data. Hundreds of Swedish nurses, all with the same habits, studied for half a century – but these kinds of powerful long-term studies were very rarely possible. Never, when the substances being tested were brand-new – literally, in the sense that they were still under patent and had brand names different from their scientific appellations.

So all the little baby biotechs, and all the start-up pharmaceuticals, paid for the best stage-one studies they could afford. They scoured the literature, and ran experiments on computers and lab samples, and then on mice or other lab animals, hunting for data that could be put through a reliable analysis that would tell them something about how a potential new medicine worked in people. Then the human trials.

It was usually a matter of two to ten years of work, costing anywhere up to five hundred million dollars, though naturally cheaper was better. Longer and more expensive than that, and the new drug or method would almost certainly be abandoned; the money would run out, and the scientists involved would by necessity move on to something else.

In this case, however, where Leo was dealing with a method that Derek Gaspar had bought for fifty-one million dollars, there could be no stage-one human trials. They would be impossible. ‘No one’s gonna let themselves be blown up like a balloon! Blown up like a goddam bike tyre! Your kidneys would get swamped or some kind of oedema would kill you.’

‘We’re going to have to tell Derek the bad news.’

‘Derek is not going to like it.’

‘Not going to like it! Fifty-one million dollars? He’s going to hate it!’

‘Think about blowing that much money. What an idiot he is.’

‘Is it worse to have a scientist who is a bad businessman as your CEO, or a businessman who is a bad scientist?’

‘What about when they’re both?’

They sat around the bench looking at the mice cages and the rolls of data sheets. A Dilbert cartoon mocked them as it peeled away from the end of the counter. It was a sign of something deep that this lab had Dilberts taped to the walls rather than Far Sides.

‘An in-person meeting for this particular communication is contra-indicated,’ said Brian.

‘No shit,’ Leo said.

Marta snorted. ‘You can’t get a meeting with him anyway.’

‘Ha ha.’ But Leo was far enough out on the periphery of Torrey Pine Generique’s power structure that getting a meeting with Derek was indeed difficult.

‘It’s true,’ Marta insisted. ‘You might as well be trying to schedule a doctor’s appointment.’

‘Which is stupid,’ Brian pointed out. ‘The company is totally dependent on what happens in this lab.’

‘Not totally,’ Leo said.

‘Yes it is! But that’s not what the business schools teach these guys. The lab is just another place of production. Management tells production what to produce, and the place of production produces it. Input from the agency of production would be wrong.’

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