Sixty Days and Counting
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

Contents

Cover

Title Page

ONE A New Reality

TWO Cut to the Chase

THREE Going Feral

FOUR The Technological Sublime

FIVE Undecided

SIX Sacred Space

SEVEN Emerson for the Day

EIGHT Partially Adjusted Demand

NINE The Third Good Correlation

TEN You Get What You Get

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE A New Reality

‘I believe the twenty-first century can become the most important century of human history. I think a new reality is emerging. Whether this view is realistic or not, there is no harm in making an effort.’

The Dalai Lama, November 15 2005, Washington D.C.

Why do you do what you do?

I guess because we still kind of believe that the world can be saved.

We? The people where you work?

Yes. Not all of them. But most. Scientists are like that. I mean, we’re seeing evidence that we seem to be starting a mass extinction event.

What’s that?

A time when lots of species are killed off by some change in the environment. Like when that meteor struck and killed off the dinosaurs.

So people hit Earth like meteor.

Yes. It’s getting to be that way for a lot of the big mammals especially. We’re in the last moments already for a lot of them.

No more tigers.

That’s right. No more lots of things. So … most of the scientists I know seem to think we ought to limit the extinctions to a minimum. Just to keep the lab working, so to speak.

The Frank Principle.

(Laughs). I guess. Some people at work call it that. Who told you that?

Drepung tell me. Saving world so science can proceed. The Frank Principle.

Right. Well – it’s like Buddhism, right? You might as well try to make a better world.

Yes. So, your National Science Foundation – very Buddhist!

Ha ha. I don’t know if I’d go that far. NSF is mostly pragmatic. They have a job to do and a budget to do it with. A rather small budget.

But a big name! National – Science – Foundation. Foundation means base, right? Base of house?

Yes. It is a big name. But I don’t think they regard themselves as particularly big. Nor particularly Buddhist. Compassion and right action are not their prime motivation.

Compassion! So what! Does it matter why, if we do good things?

I don’t know. Does it?

Maybe not!

Maybe not.

By the time Phil Chase was elected president, the world’s climate was already far along on the way to irrevocable change. There were already four hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and another hundred parts would be there soon if civilization continued to burn its fossil carbon – and at this point there was no other option. Just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in the midst of a crisis that in some ways worsened before it got better, they were entangled in a moment of history when climate change, the destruction of the natural world, and widespread human misery were combining in a toxic and combustible mix. The new president had to contemplate drastic action while at the same time being constrained by any number of economic and politic factors, not least the huge public debt left deliberately by the administrations preceding him.

It did not help that the weather that winter careened wildly from one extreme to another, but was in the main almost as cold as the previous record-breaking year. Chase joked about it everywhere he went: ‘It’s ten below zero, aren’t you glad you elected me? Just think what it would have been like if you hadn’t!’ He would end speeches with a line from the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley:

‘O, Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’

‘Maybe it can,’ Kenzo pointed out with a grin. ‘We’re in the Youngest Dryas, after all.’

In any case, it was a fluky winter – above all windy – and the American people were in an uncertain state of mind. Chase addressed this: ‘The only thing we have to fear,’ he would intone, ‘is abrupt climate change!’

He would laugh, and people would laugh with him, understanding him to be saying that there was indeed something real to fear, but that they could do something about it.

His transition team worked with an urgency that resembled desperation. Sea level was rising; temperatures were rising; there was no time to lose. Chase’s good humor and casual style were therefore welcomed, when they were not reviled – much as it had been with FDR in the previous century. He would say, ‘We got ourselves into this mess and we can get out of it. The problems create an opportunity to remake our relationship to nature, and create a new dispensation. So – happy days are here again! Because we’re making history, we are seizing the planet’s history, I say, and turning it to the good.’

Some scoffed; some listened and took heart; some waited to see what would happen.

As far as Frank Vanderwal’s personal feelings were concerned, there was something reassuring about the world being so messed up. It tended to make his own life look like part of a trend, and a small part at that. A hill of beans in this world. Perhaps even so small as to be manageable.

Although, to tell the truth, it didn’t feel that way. There were reasons to be very concerned, almost to the edge of fear. Frank’s friend Caroline had disappeared on election night, chased by armed agents of some superblack intelligence agency. She had stolen her husband’s plan to steal the election, and Frank had passed this plan to a friend at NSF with intelligence contacts, to what effect he could not be sure. He had helped her to escape her pursuers. To do that he had had to break a date with another friend, his boss and a woman he loved – although what that meant, given the passionate affair he was carrying on with Caroline, he did not know. There was a lot he didn’t know; and he could still taste blood at the back of his throat, months after his nose had been broken. He could not think for long about the same thing. He was living a life that he called parcellated, but others might call dysfunctional: i.e., semi-homeless in Washington D.C. He could have been back home in San Diego by now, where his teaching position was waiting for him. Instead he was a temporary guest of the embassy of the drowned nation of Khembalung. But hey, everyone had problems! Why should he be any different?

Although brain damage would be a little more than different. Brain damage meant something like – mental illness. It was a hard phrase to articulate when thinking about oneself. But it was possible his injury had exacerbated a lifelong tendency to make poor decisions. It was hard to tell. He thought all his recent decisions had been correct, after all, in the moment he had made them. Should he not have faith that he was following a valid line of thought? He wasn’t sure.

Thus it was a relief to think that all these personal problems were as nothing compared to the trouble all life on Earth now faced as a functioning biosphere. There were days in which he welcomed the bad news, and he saw that other people were doing the same. As this unpredictable winter blasted them with cold or bathed them in Caribbean balm, there grew in the city a shared interest and good cheer, a kind of solidarity.

Frank felt this solidarity also on the premises of the National Science Foundation, where he and many of his colleagues were trying to deal with the climate problem. To do so, they had to keep trying to understand the environmental effects of:

1) the so-far encouraging but still ambiguous results of their North Atlantic salting operation;

2) the equally ambiguous proliferation of a genetically modified ‘fast tree lichen’ that had been released by the Russians in the Siberian forest;

3) the ongoing rapid detachment and flotation of the coastal verge of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet;

4) the ongoing introduction of about nine billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, ultimate source of many other problems;

5) the ensuing uptake of some three billion tons of carbon into the oceans;

6) the continuing rise of the human population by some hundred million people a year; and, lastly,

7) the cumulative impacts of all these events, gnarled together in feedback loops of all kinds.

It was a formidable list, and Frank worked hard on keeping his focus on it.

But he was beginning to see that his personal problems – especially Caroline’s disappearance, and the election-tampering scheme she had been tangled in – were not going to be things he could ignore. They pressed on his mind.

She had called the Khembali embassy that night, and left a message saying that she was okay. Earlier, in Rock Creek Park, she had told him she would be in touch as soon as she could.

He had therefore been waiting for that contact, he told himself. But it had not come. And Caroline’s ex, who had also been her boss, had been following her that night. He had seen that Caroline knew he was following her, and had seen also that Caroline had received help in escaping from him.

So now this man might very well still be looking for her, and might also be looking for that help she had gotten, as another way of hunting for her.

Or so it seemed. Frank couldn’t be sure. He sat at his desk at NSF, staring at his computer screen, trying to think it through. He could not seem to do it. Whether it was the difficulty of the problem, or the inadequacy of his mentation, he could not be sure; but he could not do it.

So he went to see Edgardo. He entered his colleague’s office and said, ‘Can we talk about the election result? What happened that night, and what might follow?’

‘Ah! Well, that will take some time to discuss. And we were going to run today anyway. Let’s talk about it while en route.’

Frank took the point: no sensitive discussions to take place in their offices. Surveillance an all-too-real possibility. Frank had been on Caroline’s list of surveilled subjects, and so had Edgardo.

In the locker room on the third floor they changed into running clothes. At the end of that process Edgardo took from his locker a security wand that resembled those used in airports; Caroline had used one like it. Frank was startled to see it there inside NSF, but nodded silently and allowed Edgardo to run it over him. Then he did the same for Edgardo.

They appeared to be clean of devices.

Then out on the streets.

As they ran, Frank said, ‘Have you had that thing for long?’

‘Too long, my friend.’ Edgar veered side to side as he ran, warming up his ankles in his usual extravagant manner. ‘But I haven’t had to get it out for a while.’

‘Don’t you worry that having it there looks odd?’

‘No one notices things in the locker room.’

‘Are our offices bugged?’

‘Yes. Yours, anyway. The thing you need to learn is that coverage is very spotty, just by the nature of things. The various agencies that do this have different interests and abilities, and very few even attempt total surveillance. And then only for crucial cases. Most of the rest is what you might call statistical in nature, and covers different parts of the data-sphere. You can slip in and out of such surveillance.’

‘But – these so-called total information awareness systems, what about them?’

‘It depends. Mostly by total information they mean electronic data. And then also you might be chipped in various ways, which would give your GPS location, and perhaps record what you say. Followed, filmed – sure, all that’s possible, but it’s expensive. But now we’re clear. So tell me what’s up?’

‘Well – like I said. About the election results, and that program I gave you. From my friend. What happened?’

Edgardo grinned under his moustache. ‘We foxed that program. We forestalled it. You could say that we un-stole the vote in Oregon, right in the middle of the theft.’

‘We did?’

‘Apparently so. The program was a stochastic tilt engine, that had been installed in some of Oregon and Washington’s voting machines. My friends figured that out and managed to write a disabler, and to get it introduced at the very last minute, so there wasn’t any time for the people who had installed the tilter to react to the change. From the sounds of it, a very neat operation.’

Frank ran along feeling a glow spread through him as he tried to comprehend it. Not only the election, de-rigged and made honest – not only Phil Chase elected by a cleaned-up popular and electoral vote – but his Caroline had proved true. She had risked herself and come through for the country; for the world, really. And so –

Maybe she would come through for him too.

This train of thought led him through the glow to a new little flood of fear for her.

Edgardo saw at least some of this on his face, apparently, for he said, ‘So your friend is the real thing, eh?’

‘Yes.’

‘It could get tricky for her now,’ Edgardo suggested. ‘If the tweakers try to find the leakers. As we used to say at DARPA.’

‘Yeah,’ Frank said, his pulse rate rising at the thought.

‘You’ve sent a warning?’

‘I would if I could.’

‘Ah!’ Edgardo was nodding. ‘Gone away, has she?’

‘Yes,’ Frank said; and then it was all pouring out of him. He found himself telling Edgardo the whole story, of how they had met and what had followed. This was something he had never managed to do with anyone, not even Rudra or Anna, and now it felt as if some kind of hydrostatic pressure had built up inside him, his silence like a dam that had now failed and let forth a flood.

It took a few miles to tell. The meeting in the stuck elevator, the unsuccessful hunt for her, the sighting of her on the Potomac during the flood, the brief phone call with her – her subsequent call – their meetings, their – affair.

And then, her revealing the surveillance program she was part of, in which Frank and so many others, including Edgardo, were being tracked and evaluated in some kind of virtual futures market, in which investors, some of them computer programs, were making speculative investments, as in any other futures markets, but this time dealing in scientists doing certain kinds of biotech research.

And then how she had had to run away on election night, and how on that night he had helped her to evade her husband and his companions, who were now clearly correlated with the attempted election theft.

Edgardo bobbed along next to him as he told the tale, nodding at each new bit of information, lips pursed tightly, head tilted to the side. It was like confessing to a giant praying mantis.

‘So,’ he said at last. ‘Now you’re out of touch with her?’

‘That’s right. She said she’d call me, but she hasn’t.’

‘But she will have to be very careful, now that her husband knows that you exist.’

‘Yes. But – will he be able to identify who I am, do you think?’

‘I think that’s very possible, if he has access to her work files. Do you know if he does?’

‘She worked for him.’

‘So. And he knows that someone was helping her that night.’

‘More than one person, actually, because of the guys in the park.’

‘Yes. That might help you, by muddying the waters. But still, say he goes through her records to find out who she has been in contact with – will he find you?’

‘I was one of the people she had under surveillance.’

‘But there will be a lot of those. Anything more?’

Frank tried to remember. ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘I thought we were being careful, but.…’

‘Did she call you on your phone?’

‘Yes, a few times. But only from pay phones.’

‘But she might have been chipped at the time.’

‘She tried to be careful about that.’

‘Yes, but it didn’t always work, isn’t that what you said?’

‘Right. But –’ Remembering back – ‘I don’t think she ever said my name.’

‘Well – if you were ever both chipped at the same time, maybe he would be able to see when you got together. And if he sourced all your cell phone calls, some would come from pay phones, and he might be able to cross-GPS those with her.’

‘Are pay phones GPSed?’

Edgardo glanced at him. ‘They stay in one spot, which you can then GPS.’

‘Oh. Yeah.’

Edgardo cackled and waved an elbow at Frank as they ran. ‘There’s lots of ways to find people! There’s your acquaintances in the park, for instance. If he went out there and asked around, with a photo of you, he might be able to confirm.’

‘I’m just Professor Nosebleed to them.’

‘Yes, but the correlations … So,’ Edgardo said after a silence had stretched out a quarter mile or more. ‘It seems like you probably ought to take some kind of pre-emptive action.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well. You followed him to their apartment, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not your wisest move of that night, by the way.’

Frank didn’t want to explain that his capacity for decision-making had been possibly injured, and perhaps not good to begin with.

‘– but now we can probably use that information to find out his cover identity, for a start.’

‘I don’t know the address.’

‘Well, you need to get it. Also the names on the doorbell plate, if there are any. But the apartment number for sure.’

‘Okay, I’ll go back.’

‘Good. Be discreet. With that information, my friends could help you take it further. Given what’s happened, they might give it a pretty high priority, to find out who he really works for.’

‘And who do your friends work for?’

‘Well. They’re scattered around. It’s a kind of internal check group.’

‘And you trust them on this kind of stuff?’

‘Oh yes.’ There was a reptilian look in Edgardo’s eye that gave Frank a shiver.

In the days that followed, Frank passed his hours feeling baffled, and, under everything else, afraid. Or maybe, he thought, the feeling would be better characterized as extreme anxiety. He would wake in the mornings, take stock, remember where he was: in the Khembali embassy house’s garden shed, with Rudra snoring up on the bed and Frank on his foam mattress on the floor.

The daylight slanting through their one window would usually have roused him. He would listen to Rudra’s distressed breathing, sit up and tap on his laptop, look at the headlines and the weather forecast, and emersonfortheday.net:

‘We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man’s power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.’

Maybe Emerson too had been hit on the head. Frank wanted to look into that. And he needed to look into Thoreau, too. Recently the keepers of the site had been posting lots of Henry David Thoreau, Emerson’s young friend and occasional handyman. Amazing that two such minds had lived at the same time, in the same town – even for a while the same house. Thoreau, Frank was finding in these morning reads, was the great philosopher of the forest at the edge of town, and as such extremely useful to Frank – often more so, dare he say it, than the old man himself.

Today’s Thoreau was from his journal:

‘I never feel that I am inspired unless my body is also. It too spurns a tame and commonplace life. They are fatally mistaken who think, while they strive with their minds, that they may suffer their bodies to stagnate in luxury or sloth. A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as his brain. We exaggerate the importance and exclusiveness of the headquarters. Do you suppose they were a race of consumptives and dyspeptics who invented Grecian mythology and poetry? The poet’s words are, “You would almost say the body thought!” I quite say it. I trust we have a good body then.’

Except Thoreau had been a consumptive, active though he was in his daily life as a surveyor and wandering botanist. This passage had been written only two years before he died of tuberculosis, so he must have known by then that his lungs were compromised, and his trust in having a good body misplaced. For lack of a simple antibiotic, Thoreau had lost thirty years. Still he had lived the day, and paid ferocious attention to it, as a very respectable early scientist.

And so up and off! And up Frank would leap, thinking about what the New England pair had said, and would dress and slip out the door in a frame of mind to see the world and act in it. No matter how early he went out, he always found some of the old Khembalis already out in the vegetable garden they had planted in the back yard, mumbling to themselves as they weeded. Frank might stop to say hi to Qang if she were out there, or dip his head in the door to tell her whether he thought he would be home for dinner that night; that was hardly ever, but she liked it when he let her know.

Then off to Optimodal on foot, blinking dreamily in the morning light, Wilson Avenue all rumbly and stinky with cars on the way to work. The walk was a little long, as all walks in D.C. tended to be; it was a city built for cars, like every other city. But the walk forced him to wake up, and to look closely at the great number of trees he passed. Even here on Wilson, it was impossible to forget they lived in a forest.

Then into the gym for a quick workout to get his brain fully awake – or as fully awake as it got these days. There was something wrong there. A fog in certain areas. He found it was easiest to do the same thing every day, reducing the number of decisions he had to make. Habitual action was a ritual that could be regarded as a kind of worship of the day. And it was so much easier.

Sometimes Diane was there, a creature of habit also, and uneasily he would say hi, and uneasily she would say hi back. They were still supposed to be rescheduling a dinner to celebrate the salting of the North Atlantic, but she had said she would get back to him about a good time for it, and he was therefore waiting for her to bring it up, and she wasn’t. This was adding daily to his anxiety. Who knew what anything meant really.

Then at work, Diane ran them through their paces as they produced the action plan that she thought was their responsibility to the new president. They were to lay out the current moment of the abrupt climate change they were experiencing, and discuss in full whether there was any way back out of it – and if there were, what kind of policies and activities might achieve it.

One thing that she had no patience for was the idea that having restarted the Gulf Stream, they were now out of the woods. She shook her head darkly when she saw this implied in communications from other agencies, or in the media. It did not help that they were suddenly experiencing a warm spell unlike anything that had happened the previous year, when the long winter had clamped down in October and never let up until May. This year, after several hard freezes, they were experiencing a balmy and almost rain-free Indian summer. Everyone wanted to explain it by the restoration of the Gulf Stream, and there may even have been some truth to that, but there was no way to be sure. Natural variation had too great an amplitude to allow for any such one-to-one correspondence of climactic cause and effect, although unfortunately this was something the climate skeptics and carbon supporters were also always saying, so that it was tricky for Diane to try to make the distinction.

But she was persistent, even adamant. ‘We have to put the Gulf Stream action to one side, and take a look at all the rest of it,’ she commanded. ‘Chase is going to need that from us to go forward.’

Back in his office, therefore, Frank would sit at his desk, staring at his list of Things To Do. But all in a vain attempt to take his mind off Caroline.

Ordinarily the list would be enough to distract anyone. Its length and difficulty made it all by itself a kind of blow to the head. It induced an awe so great that it resembled apathy. They had done so much and yet there was so much left to do. And as more disasters blasted into the world, their Things To Do list would lengthen. It would never shorten. They were like the Dutch boy sticking his fingers into the failing dike. What had happened to Khembalung was going to happen everywhere.

But there would still be land above water. There would still be things to be done. One had to try.

Caroline had spoken of her Plan B as if she had confidence in it. She must have had a place to go, a bank account, that sort of thing.

Frank checked out the figures from the oceanography group. The oceans covered about seventy percent of the globe. About two hundred million square kilometers, therefore, and in the wake of the first really big chunks of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet floating away, sea level was reported to have risen about twenty centimeters. The oceanographers had been measuring sea level rise a millimeter at a time, mostly from water warming up and expanding, so they were blown away and spoke of this twenty centimeters’ rise as of a Noah’s flood. Kenzo was simply bursting with amazement and pride.

Back of the envelope calculation: .2 meters times the two hundred million square kilometers, was that forty thousand cubic kilometers? A lot of water. Measurements from the last few years had Antarctica losing a hundred and fifty cubic kilometers a year, with thirty to fifty more coming off Greenland. So, now about two hundred years’ worth had come off in one year. No wonder they were freaking out. The difference no doubt lay in the fact that the melt before had been actual melting, whereas now what was happening was a matter of icebergs breaking off their perch and sliding down into the ocean. Obviously it made a big difference in how fast it could happen.

Frank brought the figures in with him to the meeting of Diane’s strategic group scheduled for that afternoon, and listened to the others make their presentations. They were interesting talks, if daunting. They took his mind off Caroline, one had to say that. At least most of the time.

At the end of the talks, Diane described her sense of the situation. For her, there was a lot that was good news. First, Phil Chase was certain to be more supportive of NSF, and of science in general, than his predecessor had been. Second, the salting of the North Atlantic appeared to be having the effect they had hoped for: the Gulf Stream was now running at nearly its previous strength up into the Norwegian and Greenland Seas, following its earlier path in a manner that seemed to indicate the renewed pattern was, for now, fairly robust. They were still collecting data on the deeper part of the thermohaline circulation, which ran southward underneath the northerly flow of the Gulf Stream. If the southward undercurrent was running strong, they might be okay there.

‘There’s so much surface pressure northward,’ Kenzo said. ‘Maybe all we’ll have to do from now on is to monitor the salinity and the currents. We might be able to intervene early enough in any stall process that we wouldn’t need as much salt as we applied last fall. Maybe a certain percentage of the retiring oil fleet could be mothballed, in case we needed a salt fleet to go up there again and make another application.’

‘It would take a change in thinking,’ Diane said. ‘Up until now, people have only wanted to pay for disasters after they’ve happened, to make sure the pay-out was really necessary.’

Kenzo said, ‘But now the true costs of that strategy are becoming clear.’

‘When it’s too late,’ Edgardo added, his usual refrain.

Diane wrinkled her nose at Edgardo, as she often did, and made her usual rejoinder; they had no choice but to proceed from where they were now. ‘So, let’s follow up on that one. It would have to be a kind of insurance model, or a hedge fund. Maybe the re-insurance industry will be trying to impose something like that on the rest of the economy anyway. We’ll talk to them.’

She moved on to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet situation. One of Kenzo’s oceanographer colleagues gave them a presentation on the latest, showing with maps and satellite photos the tabular superbergs that had detached and slipped off their underwater perch and floated away.

Diane said, ‘I’d like some really good 3-D graphics on this, to show the new President and Congress, and the public too.’

‘All very well,’ Edgardo said, ‘but what can we do about it, aside from telling people it’s coming?’

Not much; or nothing. Even if they somehow managed to lower the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and therefore the air temperatures, the already rising ocean temperatures would be slow to follow. There was a continuity effect.

So they couldn’t stop the WAIS from detaching.

They couldn’t lower the rising sea level that resulted.

And they couldn’t de-acidify the ocean.

This last was a particularly troubling problem. The CO2 they had introduced into the atmosphere had been partially taken up by the ocean; the absorption rate now was about three billion tons of carbon a year into the ocean, and one estimate of the total uptake since the industrial revolution was 400 billion tons. As a result, the ocean had become measurably more acid, going from 8.2 to 8.1 on the pH scale, which was a logarithmic scale, so that the 0.1 shift meant thirty percent more hydrogen atoms in the water. It was felt that certain species of phytoplankton would have their very thin calcium shells in effect eaten away. They would die, a number of species would go extinct, and these very species constituted a big fraction of the bottom of the ocean’s food chain.

But de-acidifying the ocean was not an option. There were fairly arcane chemistry reasons why it was easier for seawater to become more acidic than to become more basic. A Royal Society paper had calculated, for the sake of estimating the scale of the problem, that if they mined and crushed exposed limestone and marble in the British Isles, ‘features such as the White Cliffs of Dover would be rapidly consumed,’ because it would take sixty square kilometers of limestone mined a hundred meters deep, every year, just to hold the status quo. All at a huge carbon cost for the excavations, of course, exacerbating the very problem they were trying to solve, But this was just a thought experiment anyway. It wouldn’t work; it was an unmitigatable problem.

And that afternoon, as they went down Diane’s list together, they saw that almost all of the climate and environmental changes they were seeing, or could see coming, were not susceptible to mitigation. Their big success of the fall, the restarting of the thermohaline cycle, had been an anomaly in that sense. The Gulf Stream had rested so closely to a tipping point in its action that humans had, by an application at the largest industrial scale they commanded, managed to tip that balance – at least temporarily. And as a result (maybe) the last month on the East Coast had been markedly warmer than the previous December had been. Perhaps they had even escaped the Youngest Dryas. So now, in one of those quick leaps that humans were prone to make (although science was not), people were talking about the climate problem as if it were something that they could terraform their way out of, or even had solved already!

It wasn’t true. Most of their remaining problems were so big that they had too much heft and momentum for people to find any way to slow them, much less reverse them.

So, at the end of this meeting, Edgardo shook his head. ‘Well, this is grim! There is not much we can do! We would need much more energy than we command right now. And it would have to be clean energy at that.’

Diane agreed. ‘Clean power is our only way out. That means solar power, I’d say. Maybe wind, although it would take an awful lot of pylons. Maybe nuclear, just one last generation to tide us over. Maybe ocean power too, if we could properly tap into currents or tides or waves. To me – when I look at factors like technical developmental readiness, and manufacturing capability, and current costs, and dangers and damage – I’d say our best chance lies in a really hard push on solar. A kind of Manhattan Project devoted to solar power.’

She raised a finger: ‘And when I say Manhattan Project, I don’t mean the kind of silver bullet that people seem to mean when they say Manhattan Project. I mean the part of the Manhattan Project that not only designed the bomb but also entrained something like twenty percent of America’s industrial capacity to make the fissionable material. About the same percent of capacity as the auto industry, and right when they needed every bit of capacity for the other parts of the war. That’s the kind of commitment we need now. Because if we had good solar power –’

She made one of her characteristic gestures, one that Frank had become very fond of: an opening of the palm, turned up and held out to the world: ‘We might be able to stabilize the climate. Let’s push all the aspects of this. Let’s organize the case, and take it to Phil Chase, and get him prepped for when he takes office.’

After the meeting, Frank couldn’t focus. He checked his e-mail, his cell phone, his FOG phone, his office phone: no messages. Caroline had not called for yet another day. No telling where she was or what was happening.

That night he wandered north up Connecticut Avenue, past the hotel were Reagan had been shot, past the Chinese embassy with its Tibetan and Falun Gong protesters in front singing, until he crossed the big bridge over Rock Creek, guarded by its four Disneyesque lion statues. Out on the middle of the bridge there was a tiny relief from the claustrophobia of the city and forest. It was one of the only places where Rock Creek seemed like a big gorge.

He continued to the clutch of little restaurants on the far side of the bridge and chose one of the Indian ones. Ate a meal thinking about the names on the wine list. Vineyards in Bangalore, why was this surprising? Read his laptop over milk tea.

When it was late enough, he struck off to the northwest, toward Bethesda. Back streets, residential, the forest taking over. Night in the city, sound of distant sirens. For the first time in the day he felt awake. It was a long hike.

Up on Wisconsin he came into the realm of the Persian rug shops, and slowed down. It was still too early. Into a bar, afraid to drink, afraid to think. A whiskey for courage. Out again into the bright night of Wisconsin, then west into the strange tangle of streets backing it. The Metro stop had been like a fountain of money and people and buildings pouring up out of the earth, overwhelming what had been here before. Some of the old houses that still remained undemolished suggested a little urban space of the 1930s, almost like the back streets of Georgetown.

This was the Quiblers’ neighborhood, but he didn’t want to intrude, nor was he in the mood to be sociable. Too late for that, but not early enough for his task. Pass by and on up Woodson, off to the left, now he was in the well-remembered neighborhood of Caroline and her ex-husband. Finally it was late enough, and yet not too late: midnight. His pulse was beginning to pound a little in his neck, and he wished he hadn’t had that whiskey. The streets were not entirely empty; in this city that wouldn’t happen until more like two. But that was okay. Up the steps of the apartment building that Caroline’s ex had gone into. The drape had pulled back at the top window of the building. He shone his penlight on the address list under its glass, took a photo of it with his cell phone. Quite a few of the little slots had been left blank. He photoed the street address above the door as well, then turned and walked down the street, away from the streetlight he had stood under on that most fateful election night. His own fate, Caroline’s, the nation’s, the world’s – but who knew. Probably it only felt that way. His heart was beating so hard. Fight or flight, sure; but what happened if one could neither fight nor flee?

He turned a corner and ran.

Back in his office. Late in the day. He had given Edgardo his information from Bethesda a few days before. Soon he would have to decide again what to do after work.

Unable to face that, he continued to work. If only he could work all the time he would never have to decide anything.

He typed up his notes from Diane’s last two meetings. So, he thought as he looked them over, it had come to this: they had fucked up the world so badly that only the rapid invention and deployment of some kind of clean power generation more powerful than what they had now would be enough to extricate them from the mess. If it could be done at all.

That meant solar, as Diane had concluded. Wind was too diffuse, waves and currents too hard to extract energy from. Fusion was like a mirage on a desert road, always the same distance away. Ordinary nuclear – well, that was a possibility, as Diane had pointed out. A very real possibility. It was dangerous and created waste for the ages, but it might be done. Some kinds of cost-benefit analysis might favor it.

But it was hard to imagine making it really safe. To do so they would have to become like the French (gasp!), who got ninety percent of their power from nuclear plants, all built to the same stringent standards. Not the likeliest scenario for the rest of the world, but not physically impossible. The U.S. Navy had run a safe nuclear program ever since the 1950s. Frank wrote on his notepad: Is French nuclear power safe? Is U.S. Navy nuclear safe? What does safe mean? Can you recycle spent fuel and guard the bomb-level plutonium that would finally reduce out of it? All that would have to be investigated and discussed. Nothing could be taken off the table just because it might create poisons that would last fifty thousand years.

On the other hand, solar was coming along fast enough to encourage Frank to hope for even more acceleration. There were problems, but ultimately the fundamental point remained: in every moment an incredible amount of energy rained down from the sun onto the Earth. That was what oil was, after all; a small portion of the sun’s energy, captured by photosynthesis over millions of years – all those plants, fixing carbon and then dying, then getting condensed into a sludge and buried rather than returning to the air. Millions of years of sunlight caught that way. Every tank of gas burned about a hundred acres of what had been a forest’s carbon. Or say a hundred years of a single acre’s production of forest carbon. This was a very impressive condensate! It made sense that matching it with the real-time energy input from any other system would be difficult.

But sunlight itself rained down perpetually. About seventy percent of the photosynthesis that took place on Earth was already entrained to human uses, but photosynthesis only caught a small fraction of the total amount of solar energy striking the planet each day. Those totals, day after day, soon dwarfed even what had been caught in the Triassic fossil carbon. Every couple of months, the whole Triassic’s capture was surpassed. So the potential was there.

This was true in so many areas. The potential was there, but time was required to realize the potential, and now it was beginning to seem like they did not have much time. Speed was crucial. This was the reason Diane and others were still contemplating nuclear.

It would be good if they needed less energy. Well, but this was an entirely different problem, dragging in many other issues – technology, consumption, lifestyles, values, habits – also the sheer number of humans on the planet. Perhaps seven billion was too many, perhaps six billion was too many. It was possible that three billion was too many. Their six billion could be a kind of oil bubble.

Edgardo was not calling, neither was Caroline calling.

Desperate for ways to occupy his mind – though of course he did not think of it that way, in order not to break the spell – Frank began to look into estimates of the Earth’s maximum human carrying capacity. This turned out (usefully enough for his real purpose) to be an incredibly vexed topic, argued over for centuries already, with no clear answers yet found. The literature contained estimates for the Earth’s human carrying capacity ranging from one hundred million to twelve trillion. Quite a spread! Although here the outliers were clearly the result of some heavily ideological analysis; the high estimate appeared to be translating the sunlight hitting the Earth directly into human calories, with no other factors included; the low estimate appeared not to like human beings, even to regard them as some kind of parasite.

The majority of serious opinion came in between two billion and thirty billion; this was satisfyingly tighter than the seven magnitudes separating the outlier estimates, but for practical purposes still a big variance, especially considering how important the real number was. If the carrying capacity of the planet were two billion, they had badly overshot and were in serious trouble, looking at a major die-back that might spiral to near extinction. If on the other hand the thirty billion figure was correct, they had some wiggle-room to maneuver.

But there were hardly any scientific or governmental organizations even looking at this issue. Zero Population Growth was one of the smallest advocacy groups in Washington, which was saying a lot; and Negative Population Growth (a bad name, it seemed to Frank) turned out to be a mom-and-pop operation run out of a garage. It was bizarre.

He read one paper, written as if by a Martian, that suggested if humanity cared to share the planet with the other species, especially the mammals – and could they really survive without them? – then they should restrict their population to something like two billion, occupying only a networked fraction of the landscape. Leaving the rest of the animals in possession of a larger networked fraction. It was a pretty persuasive paper.

As another occupier of his thoughts (though now hunger was going to drive him out into the world), he looked into theories of long-term strategic policy, thinking this might give him some tools for thinking through these things. It was another area that seemed on the face of it to be important, yet was under-studied as far as Frank could tell. Most theorists in the field, he found, had agreed that the goal or method of long-term strategic thinking ought to be ‘robustness,’ which meant that you had to find things to do that would almost certainly do some good, no matter which particular future came to pass. Nice work if you could get it! Although some of the theorists actually had developed rubrics to evaluate the robustness of proposed policies. That could be useful. But when it came to generating the policies, things got more vague.

Just do the obvious things, Vanderwal. Do the necessary.

Diane was already acting in the manner suggested by most long-term strategy theory, because in any scenario conceivable, copious amounts of clean solar energy would almost certainly be a good thing. It was, therefore, a robust plan.

So, solar power:

1) there were the photovoltaics, in which sunlight was transformed into alternating current by way of photons stimulating piezoelectricity in silicon.

2) There were the Stirling engines, external heat engines that used mirror dishes controlled by computers to reflect sunlight onto a hydrogen-filled closed element that heated to 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, driving pistons which generated the electricity. The engine had been designed by a Scot named Stirling in 1816.

All solar technologies had efficiency rates measured as a percentage of the sunlight’s photonic energy transferred successfully to alternating current electricity. They had been getting some really good numbers from solar panels, up to twenty percent, but this Stirling engine got thirty, Given the amount of photons raining down, that was really good. That would add up fast.

Then he found a link to a site that explained that Southern California Edison had built a Stirling system to power a 500 megawatt plant; most traditionally-powered plants were 500 or a thousand megawatts, so this was full size. That meant there was some practical experience with real-world, commercial versions of this technology. Also some manufacturing ability, ready to be deployed. All good news when contemplating the need for speed.

Banishing the thought (recurrent about every hour) that they should have been doing this a long time ago, Frank called SCE and asked a long string of questions of the CPM (the Cognizant Program Manager, a useful acronym that only NSF appeared to use). This turned out to be a man who was more than happy to talk – who would have talked all day, maybe all night. With difficulty Frank got him to stop. Lots of enthusiasm for the Stirling system there.

Well, more grist for the mill. Over the past year Frank had been giving alternative energy about a quarter of his working time, and now he saw he was going to have to bump that up. Everything from now on would be jacked to emergency levels. Not a comfortable feeling, but there was no avoiding it. It was like an existential condition, as if he had become Alice’s White Rabbit: I’m late! I’m late! I’m late! And most of the time he managed to obscure from his conscious train of thought the true source of his anxiety.

One day, later that week, when he was deep in work’s oblivion, Diane appeared in his doorway, startling him. He was pleased, then nervous; they had not yet found a new balance. After Caroline had called Frank with her emergency situation, Frank had hastily called Diane to cancel before thinking of any plausible non-other-woman-related reason for doing so, and so had given no explanation at all – which opacity was suspicious, and probably more impolite than the cancellation per se. Opacity seldom conducive to rapport.

‘Hi, Diane,’ he said now, aping normality. ‘What’s happening?’

She looked at him with a curious expression. ‘I just got a call from Phil Chase.’

‘Wow, what did he want?’

‘He asked me if I would be his science advisor.’

Frank found he was standing. He reached out and shook Diane’s hand, then hugged her. ‘Now that is news we have to celebrate,’ he declared, seizing the bull by the horns. ‘I’m sorry about that the other night, I still owe you dinner! Can I take you out tonight?’

‘Sure,’ she said easily, as if there had been no problem. She was so cool; maybe there never had been a problem. Frank couldn’t be sure. ‘Meet you at,’ she checked her watch, ‘at six, okay? Now I’m going to go call my kids.’

But then she stopped on her way out, and again looked at him oddly. ‘You must have had something to do with this,’ she said suddenly.

‘Me? I don’t think so. What do you mean?’

‘Talking to Charlie Quibler, maybe?’

‘Oh, no. I mean, of course I’ve talked to Charlie about some of our stuff, generally –’

‘And he’s been Chase’s environment guy.’

‘Well yes, but you know, Charlie’s just part of a large staff, and he’s been staying at home with Joe, so he hasn’t been a major factor with Chase for some time, as I understand it. Mostly just a voice on the phone. He says he doesn’t get listened to. He says he’s kind of like Jiminy Cricket was to Pinocchio, when Pinocchio’s nose was at its longest.’

Diane laughed. ‘Yeah sure. Let’s meet over at Optimodal, shall we? Let’s say seven instead of six. I want to run some of this off.’

Now that was something he could understand. ‘Sure. See you there.’

Frank sat in his chair feeling his chest puffed out: another cliché revealed to be an accurate account of emotion’s effects on the body. Everyone was the same. It occurred to him that maybe Charlie had had something to do with it, after all. Someone had to have advised Chase whom to choose for this post, and as far as Frank knew, Chase and Diane had never met. So – that was interesting.

Frank went over to the Optimodal Health Club just after six, waved to Diane on the elliptical in the next room, and stomped up the stairmaster for the equivalent of about a thousand vertical feet. After that he showered and dressed, getting into one of his ‘nicer’ shirts for the occasion, and met Diane out in the lobby at the appointed time. She too had changed into something nice, and for a second Frank considered the possibility that she lived out of her office and Optimodal, just as he had contemplated doing before building his treehouse. What evidence did he or anyone else have to disprove it? When they arrived in the morning she was there, when they left at night she was there. There were couches in her big office, and she went to Optimodal every morning of the week, as far as he knew.…

But then again, she certainly had a home somewhere. Everyone did, except for him. And the bros in the park. And the fregans and ferals proliferating in the metropolis. Indeed some twenty or thirty million people in America, he had read. But one thought of everyone as having a home.

Enough – it was time to refocus on the moment and their date. It had to be called that. Their second date, in fact – the first one having occurred by accident in New York, after discussing the North Atlantic project at the UN. And now they were in a Lebanese restaurant in Georgetown that Diane had recently discovered.

And it was very nice. Now they could celebrate not only the actual salting itself, but its subsequent success in restarting the thermohaline; and now, also, Diane’s invitation to become the new Presidential science advisor.

She was pleased with this last, Frank could see. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said to her when they were settled into the main course. ‘Is it a good position? I mean, what does the science advisor do?’ Did it have any power, in other words?

‘It all depends on the President,’ Diane said. ‘I’ve been looking into it, and it appears the position began as Nixon’s way of spanking the science community for publicly backing Johnson over Goldwater. He sent NSF packing out here to Arlington, and abolished his science advisory committee, and established this position. So it became a single advisor he could appoint without any consultation or approval mechanism, and then he could stick them on the shelf somewhere. Which is where these people have usually stayed, except in a few instances.’

That didn’t sound good. ‘But?’

‘Well, in theory, if a president were listening, it could get pretty interesting. I mean, clearly there’s a need for more coordination of the sciences in the federal government. We’ve seen that at NSF. Ideally there would be a cabinet post, you know, some kind of Department of Science, with a Secretary of Science.’

‘The science czar.’

‘Yes.’ She was wrinkling her nose. ‘Except that would create huge amounts of trouble, because really, most of the federal agencies are already supposed to be run scientifically, or have science as part of their subject, or in their operation. So if someone tried to start a Department of Science, it would poach on any number of other agencies, and none of them would stand for it. They would gang up on such an advisor and kill him, like they did to the so-called intelligence czar when they tried to coordinate the intelligence agencies.’

This gave Frank a chill. ‘Yeah, I guess that’s right.’

‘So, now, maybe the science advisor could act like a kind of personal advisor. You know. If we presented a menu of really robust options, and Chase chose some of them to enact, then … well. It would be the President himself advocating for science.’

‘And he might want to do that, given the situation.’

‘Yes, it seems that way, doesn’t it? Although Washington has a way of bogging people down.’

‘The swamp.’

‘Yes, the swamp. But if the swamp freezes over’ – they laughed – ‘then maybe we can iceskate over the obstacles!’

Frank nodded. ‘Speaking of which, we were supposed to be going to try iceskating down here, when the river froze over.’

‘That’s right, we were. But now we’ve got this so-called heat spell.’

‘True. Return of the Gulf Stream.’

‘That is so crazy. I bet we will get freezing spells just like before.’

‘Yes. Well, until that happens maybe we can just walk the shore then, and see where you could rent ice skates when the time comes.’

‘Sure. I think the Georgetown Rowing Club is going to do it, we can go check it out. I read they’re going to convert to a skating center when the river freezes over. They’re going to put out floodlights and boundary lines and everything.’

‘Good for them! Let’s go take a look after dinner.’

And so they finished the meal cheerfully, moving from one great Levantine dish to the next. Even the basics were exquisite: olives, hummus, dill – everything. And by the time they were done they had split a bottle of a dry white wine. They walked down to the Potomac arm-in-arm, as they had in Manhattan so very briefly; they walked the Georgetown waterfront, where the potted shrubs lining the river wall were lit by little white Christmas tree lights. All this had been overwhelmed in the great flood, and they could still see the high water mark on the buildings behind the walk, but other than that, things were much as they had been before, the river as calm as a sheet of black silk as it poured under the Key Bridge.

Then they came to the mouth of Rock Creek, a tiny little thing. Following it upstream in his mind, Frank came to the park and his treehouse, standing right over a bend in this same creek – and thus it occurred to him to think, Here you are fooling around with another woman while your Caroline is in trouble God knows where. What would she think if she saw you?

Which was a hard thought to recover from; and Diane saw that his mood had changed. Quickly he suggested they warm up over drinks.

They retired to a bar overlooking the confluence of the creek and the river, on the Georgetown side. They ordered Irish coffees. Frank warmed up again, his sudden stab of dread dispelled by Diane’s immense calmness, by the aura of reality that emanated from her. It was reassuring to be around her; precisely the opposite of the feeling he had when –

But he stayed in the moment. He agreed with Diane’s comment that Irish coffee provided the perfect compound of stimulant and relaxant, sugar and fat, hydration and warmth. ‘It must have been invented by scientists,’ she said. ‘It’s like made to a formula to hit all the receptors at once.’

Frank said, ‘I remember it’s what they always used to serve at the Salk Institute after their seminars. They’ve got a patio deck overlooking the Pacific, and everyone would go out with Irish coffees and watch the sunset.’

‘Nice.’

Later, as Frank walked her back up through Georgetown to her car, she said, ‘I was wondering if you’d be interested in joining my advisory staff. It would be an extension of the work you’ve been doing at NSF. I mean, I know you’re planning to go back to San Diego, but until then, you know … I could use your help.’

Frank had stopped walking. Diane turned and glanced up at him, shyly it seemed, and then looked away, down M Street. The stretch they could see looked to Frank like the Platonic form of a Midwestern main street, totally unlike the rest of D.C.

‘Sure,’ Frank heard himself say. He realized that in some sense he had to accept her offer. He had no choice; he was only in D.C. now because of her previous invitation to work on the climate problem, and he had been doing that for a year now. And they were friends, they were colleagues; they were … ‘I mean, I’ll have to check with my department and all first, to make sure it will all be okay at UCSD. But I think it could be really interesting.’

‘Oh good. Good. I was hoping you’d say yes.’

The next morning, at work his doorway darkened, and he swung his chair around, expecting to see Diane, there to discuss their move to the Presidential science advisors’ offices –

‘Oh! Edgardo!’

‘Hi, Frank. Hey, are you up for getting a bite at the Food Factory?’ Waggling his eyebrows Groucho-istically.

‘Sure,’ Frank said, trying to sound natural. It was hard not to look around his office as he saved and shut the file he was working on.

On the way to the Food Factory, Edgardo surreptitiously ran a wand over Frank, and gave it to Frank, who did the same for him. Then they went in and stood at a bar, noisily eating chips and salsa.

‘What is it?’

‘A friend of mine has tracked down your friend and her husband.’

‘Ah ha! And?’

‘They work for a unit of a black agency called Advanced Research and Development Agency Prime. The man’s name is Edward Cooper, and hers is Caroline Churchland. They ran a big data mining effort, which was a combination of the Total Information Awareness project and some other black programs in Homeland Security.’

‘Wait – she didn’t work for him?’

‘No. My friend says it was more like the other way around. She headed the program, but he was brought in to help when some surveillance issues cropped up. He came from Homeland Security, and before that CIA, where he was on the Afghanistan detail. My friend says the program got a lot more serious when he arrived.’

‘Serious?’

‘Some surveillance issues. My friend didn’t know what that meant. And then this attempt on the election that she tipped us to.’

‘But he worked for her?’

‘Yes.’

‘And when did they get married?’

‘About two years before he joined her project.’

‘And he worked for her.’

‘That’s what I was told. Also, my friend thinks he probably knows where she’s gone.’

‘What!’

‘That’s what he told me. On the night she disappeared, you see, there was a call from a pay phone she had used before, a call to the Khembali embassy. I take it that was to you?’

‘She left a message,’ Frank muttered, more and more worried. ‘But so?’

‘Well, there was another call from that pay phone, to a number in Maine. My friend found the address for that number, and it’s the number of your friend’s college roommate. And that roommate has a vacation home on an island up there. And the power has just been turned on for that vacation home. So he thinks that’s where she may have gone, and, as I’m sure you can see, he furthermore thinks that if he can track her that well, at his remove, then her husband is likely to be even faster at it.’

‘Shit.’ Frank’s feet were cold.

‘Shit indeed. Possibly you should warn her. I mean, if she thinks she’s hidden herself –’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Frank said, thinking furiously. ‘But another thing – if her ex could find her, couldn’t he find me too?’

‘Maybe so.’

They regarded each other.

‘We have to neutralize this guy somehow,’ Frank said.

Edgardo shook his head. ‘Do not say that, my friend.’

‘Why not?’

‘Neutralize?’ He dragged out the word, his expression suddenly black. ‘Eliminate? Remove? Equalize? Disable? DX? Disappear? Liquidate?’

‘I don’t mean any of those,’ Frank explained. ‘I just meant neutralize. As in, unable to affect us. Made neutral to us.’

‘Hard to do,’ Edgardo said. ‘I mean, get a restraining order? You don’t want to go there. It doesn’t work even if you can get one.’

‘Well?’

‘You may just have to live with it.’

‘Live with it? With what?’

Edgardo shrugged. ‘Hard to say right now.’

‘I can’t live with it if he’s trying to harm her, and there’s a good chance of him finding her.’

‘I know.’

‘I’ll have to go find her first.’

Edgardo nodded, looking at him with an evaluative expression. ‘Maybe so.’

At the Quiblers’ house in Bethesda this unsettled winter, things were busier than ever. This was mainly because of Phil Chase’s election, which of course had galvanized his Senatorial office, turning his staff into one part of a much larger transition team.

A presidential transition was a major thing, and there were famous cases of failed transitions by earlier administrations that were enough to put a spur to their rears, reminding them of the dire consequences that ineptitude in this area could have on the subsequent fates of the presidents involved. It was important to make a good running start, to craft the kind of ‘first hundred days’ that had energized the incoming administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, setting the model for most presidents since to try to emulate. Critical appointments had to be made, bold new programs turned into law.

Phil was well aware of this challenge and its history, and was determined to meet it successfully. ‘We’ll call it the First Sixty Days,’ he said to his staff. ‘Because there’s no time to lose!’ He had not slowed down after the election; indeed it seemed to Charlie Quibler that he had even stepped up the pace, if that were possible. Ignoring the claim of irregularities in the Oregon vote – claims which had become standard in any case ever since the tainted elections at the beginning of the century – and secure in the knowledge that the American public did not like to think about troubling news of this sort no matter who won, Phil was free to forge ahead with a nonstop schedule of meetings, meetings from dawn till midnight, and often long past it. He was lucky he was one of those people who only needed a few hours of sleep a day to get by.

Not so Charlie, who was jolted out of sleep far too often by calls from his colleague Roy Anastopholous, Phil’s new chief of staff, asking him to come down to the office and pitch in.

‘Roy, I can’t,’ Charlie would say. ‘I’ve got Joe here, Anna’s off to work already, and we’ve got Gymboree.’

‘Gymboree? Am I hearing this? Charlie which is more important to the fate of the Republic, advising the President or going to Gymboree?’

‘False choice,’ Charlie would snap. ‘Although Gymboree is far more important if we want Joe to sleep well at night, which we do. You’re talking to me now, right? That’s what telephones are for. How would this change in any way if I were down there?’

‘Yeah yeah yeah yeah, hey Chucker I gotta go now, but listen you have to come in from the cold, this is no time to be baby-sitting, we’ve got the fate of the world in the balance and we need you in the office and taking one of these crucial jobs that no one else can fill as well as you can. Joe is around two right? So you can put him in the daycare down here at the White House, or anywhere else in the greater metropolitan region for that matter, but you have to be here or else you will have missed the train, Phil isn’t going to stand for someone phoning home like E.T., lost somewhere in Bethesda when the world is sinking and freezing and drowning and burning up and everything else all at once.’

‘Roy. Stop. I am talking to you like once an hour, maybe more. I couldn’t talk to you more if we were handcuffed together.’

‘Yeah it’s nice it’s sweet it’s one of the treasured parts of my day, but it’s a face business, you know that, and I haven’t seen you in months, and Phil hasn’t either, and I’m afraid it’s getting to be a case of not seen not heard.’

‘Are you establishing a climate change task force?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to ask Diane Chang to be the science advisor?’

‘Yes. He already did.’

‘And are you going to convene a meeting with all the reinsurance companies?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re proposing the legislative package to the Congress?’

This was Charlie’s big omnibus environmental bill, brought back – in theory – from death by dismemberment.

‘Of course we are.’

‘So how exactly am I being cut out? That’s every single thing I’ve ever suggested to you.’

‘But Charlie, I’m looking forward, to how you will be cut out. You’ve gotta put Joe in daycare and come in out of the cold.’

‘But I don’t want to.’

‘I gotta go you get a grip and get down here bye.’

He sounded truly annoyed. But Charlie could speak his mind with Roy, and he wasn’t going to let the election change that. And when he woke up in the morning, and considered that he could either go down to the Mall and talk policy with policy wonks all day, and get home late every night – or he could spend that day with Joe wandering the parks and bookstores of Bethesda, calling in to Phil’s office from time to time to have those same policy talks in mercifully truncated form, he knew very well which day he preferred. It was an easy call, a no-brainer. He liked spending time with Joe. With all its problems and crises, he enjoyed it more than almost anything he had ever done. And Joe was growing up fast, and Charlie could see that what he enjoyed most in their life together was only going to last until preschool, if then. It went by fast!

Indeed, in the last week or so it seemed that Joe was changing so fast that Charlie’s desire to spend time with him was becoming as much a result of worry as of desire for pleasure. It seemed he was dealing with a different kid. But Charlie suppressed this feeling, and tried to pretend to himself that it was only for positive reasons that he wanted to stay home.

Only occasionally, and for short periods, could he think honestly about this to himself. Nothing about the matter was obvious, even when he did try to think about it. Because ever since their trip to Khembalung, Joe had been a little different – feverish, Anna claimed, although only her closest ovulation-monitoring thermometer could find this fever – but in any case hectic, and irritable in a way that was unlike his earlier irritability, which had seemed to Charlie a kind of cosmic energy, a force chafing at its restraints. After Khembalung it had turned peevish, even pained.

All this had coincided with what Charlie regarded as undue interest in Joe on the part of the Khembalis, and Charlie had gotten Drepung to admit that the Khembalis thought that Joe was one of their great lamas, reincarnated in Joe’s body. That’s how it happened, to their way of thinking.

After that news, and also at Charlie’s insistence, they had performed a kind of exorcism ritual (they had not put it like that) designed to drive any reincarnated soul out of Joe, leaving the original inhabitant, which was the only one Charlie wanted in there. But now he was beginning to wonder if all that had been a good idea. Maybe, he was beginning to think, his original Joe had in fact been the very personality that the Khembalis had driven out.

Not that Joe was all that different. Anna declared his fever was gone, and he was therefore more relaxed, and that his moodiness was much as before.

Only to Charlie he was clearly different, in ways he found hard to characterize to himself – but chiefly, the boy was now too content with things as they were. His Joe had never been like that, not since the very moment of his birth, which from all appearances had angered him greatly. Charlie could still remember seeing his little red face just out of Anna, royally pissed off and yelling.

But none of that now. No tantrums, no imperious commands. He was calm, he was biddable; he was even inclined to take naps. It just wasn’t his Joe.

Given these new impressions, Charlie was not in the slightest inclined to want to put Joe in a new situation, thus confusing the issue even further. He wanted to hang out with him, see what he was doing and feeling; he wanted to study him. This was what parental love came down to, apparently, sometimes, especially with a toddler, a human being in one of the most transient and astonishing of all the life stages. Someone coming to consciousness!

But the world was no respecter of Charlie’s feelings. Later that morning his cell phone rang again, and this time it was Phil Chase himself.

‘Charlie, how are you?’

‘I’m fine, Phil, how are you? Are you getting any rest?’

‘Oh yeah sure. I’m still on my post-campaign vacation, so things are very relaxed.’

‘Uh huh, sure. That’s not what Roy tells me. How’s the transition coming?’

‘It’s coming fine, as I understand it. I thought that was your bailiwick.’

Charlie laughed with a sinking feeling. Already he felt the change in Phil’s status begin to weigh on him, making the conversation seem more and more surreal. He had worked for Phil for a long time, but always while Phil had been a senator; Charlie had long since gotten used to the considerable and yet highly circumscribed power that Phil as senator had wielded. It had become normalized, indeed had become kind of a running joke between them, in that Charlie often had reminded Phil just how completely circumscribed his power was.

Now that just wasn’t going to work. The president of the United States might be many things, but un-powerful was not among them. Many of the administrations preceding Phil’s had worked very hard to expand the powers of the executive branch beyond what the constitutional framers had intended – which campaigns made a mockery of the ‘strict constitutionalist’ talk put out by these same people when discussing what principles the Supreme Court’s justices should hold, and showed they preferred a secretive executive dictatorship to democracy, especially if the president were a puppet installed by the interested parties. But never mind; the result of their labors was an apparatus of power that if properly understood and utilized could in many ways rule the world. Bizarre but true: the president of the United States could rule the world, both by direct fiat and by setting the agenda that everyone else had to follow or be damned. World ruler. Not really, of course, but it was about as close as anyone could get. And how exactly did you joke about that?

‘Your clothes are still visible?’ Charlie inquired, oppressed by these thoughts.

‘To me they are. But look,’ passing on a full riposte, as being understood in advance – although Phil could no doubt see the comedy of omnipotence as well as the comedy of constraint – ‘I wanted to talk to you about your position in the administration. Roy says you’re being a little balky, but obviously we need you.’

‘I’m here already. I can talk twelve hours a day, if you like.’

‘Well, but a lot of these jobs require more than that. They’re in-person jobs, as you know.’

‘What do you mean, like which ones?’

‘Well, like for instance head of the EPA.’

‘WHAT?’ Charlie shouted. He reeled, literally, in that he staggered slightly to the side, then listed back to catch himself. ‘Don’t you be scaring me, Phil! I hope you’re not thinking of making appointments as stupid as that! Jesus, you know perfectly well I’m not qualified for that job! You need a first-rate scientist for that one, a major researcher with some policy and administrative experience, we’ve talked about this already! Every agency needs to feel appreciated and supported to keep esprit de corps and function at the highest levels, you know that! Isn’t Roy reminding you? You aren’t making a bunch of stupid political appointments, are you?’

Phil was cracking up. ‘See? That’s why we need you down here!’

Charlie sucked down some air. ‘Oh. Ha ha. Very funny. Don’t be scaring me like that, Phil.’

‘I was serious, Charlie. You’d be fine heading the EPA. We need someone there with a global vision of the world’s environmental problems. And we’ll find someone like that. But that wouldn’t be the best use for you, I agree.’

‘Good.’ Charlie felt as if a bullet had just whizzed by his head. He was quivering as he said, very firmly, ‘Let’s just keep things like they are with me.’

‘No, that’s not what I mean, either. Listen, can you come down here and at least talk it over with me? Fit that into your schedule?’

Well, shit. How could he say no? This was his boss, also the President of the United States, speaking. But if he had to talk to him in person about it … He sighed. ‘Yeah, yeah, of course. Your wish is my demand.’

‘Bring Joe, if you can, I’d enjoy seeing him. We can take him out for a spin on the Tidal Basin.’

‘Yeah yeah.’

What else could he say?

The problem was that Yeah Yeah was pretty much the only thing you could say, when replying to the President of the United States making a polite request of you. Perhaps there had been some presidents who had established a limit there, by asking for impossible things and then seeing what happened; power could quickly bring out the latent sadism in the powerful; but if a sane and clever president wanted only ever to get yeses in response to his questions, he could certainly frame them to make it that way. That was just the way it was.

Certainly it was hard to say no to a president-elect inviting you and your toddler to paddle around the Tidal Basin in one of the shiny blue pedal boats docked on the east side of the pond.

And once on the water, it indeed proved very hard to say no to Phil. Joe was wedged between them, lifejacketed and strapped down by Secret Service agents in ways that even Anna would have accepted as safe. He was looking about blissfully; he had even been fully compliant and agreeable about getting into the life jacket and being tied down by the seat belting. It had made Charlie a bit seasick to watch. Now it felt like Phil was doing most of the pumping on the boat’s foot pedals. He was also steering.

Phil was always in a good mood on the water, rapping away about nothing, looking down at Joe, then over the water at the Jefferson Memorial, the most graceful but least emotional of the city’s memorials; beaming at the day, sublimely unaware of the people on the shore path who had noticed him and were exclaiming into their cell phones or taking pictures with them. The Secret Service people had taken roost on the paddle boat dock, and there were an unusual number of men in suits walking the shore among the tourists and joggers.

‘Where I need you in the room,’ Phil said out of the blue, ‘is when we gather a global warming task force. I’ll be out of my depth in that crowd, and there’ll be all kinds of information and plans put forth. That’s where I’ll want your impressions, both real-time and afterward, to help me crosscheck what I think. It won’t do to have me describe these things to you after the fact. There isn’t time for that, and besides I might miss the most important thing.’

‘Yeah, well –’

‘None of that! This task force will be as close to a Department of Science or a Department for the Environment as I can make. It’s going to set the agenda for a lot of what we do. It’ll be my strategy group, Charlie, and I’m saying I need you in it. Now, I’ve looked into the daycare facilities for children at the White House. They’re adequate, and we can get to work making them even better. Joe will be my target audience. You’d like to play all day with a bunch of kids, wouldn’t you Joe?’

‘Yeah Phil,’ Joe said, happy to be included in the conversation.

‘We’ll set up whatever system works best for you, what do you think of that?’

‘I like that,’ Joe said.

Charlie started to mutter something about the Chinese women who buried their infants up to the neck in riverbank mud every day to leave them to go to work in the rice paddies, but Phil overrode him.

‘Gymboree in the basement, if that’s what it takes! Laser tag, paint-ball wars – you name it! You’d like paint-ball wars, wouldn’t you Joe.’

‘Big truck,’ Joe observed, pointing at the traffic on Independence Avenue.

‘Sure, we could have big trucks too. We could have a monster truck pull right on the White House lawn.’

‘Monster truck.’ Joe smiled at the phrase.

Charlie sighed. It really seemed to him that Joe should be shouting big trucks right now, or trying to escape and crawling around among the turning pedals underfoot, or leaping overboard to go for a swim. Instead he was listening peacefully to Phil’s banter, with an expression that said he understood just as much as he wanted to, and approved of it in full.

Ah well. Everyone changed. And in fact, that had been the whole point of the ceremony Charlie had asked the Khembalis to conduct! Charlie had requested it – had insisted on it, in fact! But without, he now realized, fully imagining the consequences.

Phil said, ‘So you’ll do it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You more or less have to, right? I mean, you’re the one who first suggested that I run, when we were over at Lincoln.’

‘Everyone was telling you that.’

‘No they weren’t. Besides, you were first.’

‘No, you were. I just thought it would work.’

‘And you were right, right?’

‘Apparently so.’

‘So you owe me. You got me into this mess.’

Phil smiled, waved at some tourists as he made a broad champing turn back toward the other side of the Basin. Charlie sighed. If he agreed, he would not see Joe anywhere near as much as he was used to – an idea he hated. On the other hand, if he didn’t see him as much, he wouldn’t notice so often how much Joe had changed. And he hated that change.

So much to dislike! Unhappily he said, ‘I’ll have to talk to Anna about it first. But I think she’ll go for it. She’s pretty pro-work. So. Shit. I’ll give it a try. I’ll give it a few months, and see how it goes. By that time your task force should be on their way, and I can see where things stand and go emeritus if I need to.’

‘Good.’ And Phil pedaled furiously, almost throwing Charlie’s knees up into his chin with the force of his enthusiasm. He said, ‘Look, Joe, all the people are waving at you!’

Joe waved back. ‘Hi people!’ he shouted. ‘Big truck, right there! Look! I like that big truck. That’s a good truck.’

And so: change. The inexorable emergence of difference in time. Becoming. One of the fundamental mysteries.

Charlie hated it. He liked being; he hated becoming. This was, he thought, an indicator of how happy he had been with the way things were, the situation as he had had it. Mister Mom – he had loved it. Just this last May he had been walking down Leland Street and had passed Djina, one of the Gymboree moms he knew, biking the other way, and he had called out to her ‘Happy Mother’s Day!’ and she had called back, ‘Same to you!’ and he had felt a glow in him that had lasted an hour. Someone had understood.

Of course the pure mom routine of the 1950s was an Ozzie and Harriet nightmare, a crazy-making program so effective that the surprise was there were any moms at all in that generation who had stayed sane. Most of them had gone nuts in one way or another, because in its purest form that life was too constrained to the crucial but mindless daily chores of child-rearing and house maintenance – ‘uncompensated labor,’ as the economists put it, but in a larger sense than what they meant with their idiot bean-counting. Coming in the fifties, hard on the heels of World War Two’s shattering of all norms, its huge chaotic space of dislocation and freedom for young women, it must have felt like a return to prison after a big long break-out.

But that wasn’t the life Charlie had been leading. Along with the child care and the shopping and the housework had been his ‘real’ work as a senatorial aide, which, even though it had been no more than a few phone conversations a day, had bolstered the ‘unreal’ work of Mr. Momhood in a curious dual action. Eventually which work was ‘real’ had become a moot point; the upshot was that he felt fulfilled, and the lucky and accidental recipient of a full life. Maybe even overfull! But that was what happened when Freud’s short list of the important things in life – work and love – were all in play.

He had had it all. And so change be damned! Charlie wanted to live on in this life forever. Or if not forever, then as long as the stars. And he feared change, as being the probable degradation of a situation that couldn’t be bettered.

But here it was anyway, and there was no avoiding it. All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived. This was what the Khembalis were always saying; it was one of the Buddhist basics. And now Charlie had to try to believe it.

So, the day came when he got up, and Anna left for work, then Nick for school; then it was Joe and Da’s time, the whole day spread before them like a big green park. But on this day, Charlie prepped them both to leave, while talking up the change in the routine. ‘Big day, Joe! We’re off to school and work, to the White House! They have a great daycare center there, it’ll be like Gymboree!’

Joe looked up. ‘Gymboree?’

‘Yes, like Gymboree, but not it exactly.’ Charlie’s mood plummeted as he thought of the differences – not one hour but five, or six, or eight, or twelve – and not parents and children together, but the child alone in a crowd of strangers. And he had never even liked Gymboree!

More and more depressed, he strapped Joe into his stroller and pushed him down to the Metro. The tunnel walls were still discolored or even wet in places, and Joe checked everything out as on any other trip. This was one of their routines.

Phil himself was not installed in the White House yet, but the arrangements had been made for Joe to join the daycare there, after which Charlie would leave and walk over to the senate offices in the old Joiner’s Union building. Up and out of the Metro, into warm air, under low windy clouds. People scudded underneath them, hurrying from one shelter to the next before rain hit.

Charlie had gotten out at Smithsonian, and the Mall was almost empty, only a few runners in sight. He pushed Joe along faster and faster, feeling more and more desolate – unreasonably so, almost to the point of despair – especially as Joe continued to babble on happily, energized by the Mall and the brewing storm, no doubt expecting something like their usual picnic and play session on the Mall. Hours that no matter how tedious they had seemed at the time were now revealed as precious islands in eternity, as paradises lost. And it was impossible to convey to Joe that today was going to be different. ‘Joe, I’m going to drop you off at the daycare center here at the White House. You’re going to get to play with the other kids and the teachers and you have to do what the teachers say for a long time.’

‘Cool Dad. Play!’

‘Yeah that’s right. Maybe you’ll love it.’

It was at least possible. Vivid in Charlie’s mind was Anna’s story about taking Nick to daycare for the first time, and seeing Nick’s expression of stoic resignation, which had pierced her so; Charlie had seen the look himself, taking Nick in those first few times. But Joe was no stoic, and would never resign himself to anything. Charlie was anticipating something more like chaos and disorder, perhaps even mayhem, Joe moving from protest to tirade to rampage. But who knew? The way Joe was acting these days, anything was possible. He might love it. He could be gregarious, and he liked crowds and parties. It was really more a matter of liking them too much, taking them too far.

In any case, in they went. Security check, and then inside and down the hall to the daycare center, a well-appointed and very clean place. Lots of little kids running around among toys and play structures, train sets and bookshelves and legos and all. Joe’s eyes grew round. ‘Hey Dad! Big Gymboree!’

‘That’s right, like Gymboree. Except I’m going to go, Joe. I’m going to go and leave you here.’

‘Bye Dad!’ And off he ran without a backward glance.

TWO Cut to the Chase

‘And if you think this is utopian, please think also why it is such.’

—Brecht

Phil Chase was a man with a past. He was one of Congress’s Vietnam vets, and that was by and large a pretty rambunctious crowd. They had license to be a little crazy, and not all of them took it, but it was there if they wanted it.

Phil had wanted it. He had always played that card to the hilt. Unconventional, unpredictable, devil-may-care, friend of McCain. And for well over a decade, his particular shtick had been to be the World’s Senator, phoning in his work or jetting into D.C. at the last hour to make votes he had to make in person. All this had been laid before the people of California as an explicit policy, with the invitation to vote him out of office if they did not like it. But they did. Like a lot of California politicians who had jumped onto the national stage, his support at home was strong. High negatives, sure, but high positives, with the positives out-running the negatives by about two-to-one. Now that he was President, the numbers had only polarized more, in the usual way of American politics, everyone hooked on the soap opera of cheering for or against personalities.

So a checkered past was a huge advantage in creating the spectacle. In his particular version of the clichéd list, Phil had been a reporter for the LA Times, a surfboard wax manufacturer (which business had bankrolled the start of his political career), a VA social worker, a college lecturer in history, a sandal maker, and a apprentice to a stone mason. From that job he had run for congress from Marin County, and won the seat as an outsider Democrat. This was a difficult thing to do. The Democratic party hated outsiders to join the party and win high office at the first try; they wanted everyone to start at the bottom of the ladder and work their way up until thoroughly brainwashed and obliged.

Worse yet, Phil had then jumped into a weak Senatorial race, and ridden the state’s solid Democratic majority into the Senate, even though the party was still offended and not behind him.

Soon after that, his wife of twenty-three years, his high school sweetheart, who had served in Vietnam as a nurse to be closer to him after he was drafted, died in a car crash. It was after that that Phil had started his globe-trotting, turning into the World’s Senator. Because he kept his distance from D.C. through all those years, no one in the capital knew much about his personal life. What they knew was what he gave them. From his account it was all travel, golf, and meetings with foreign politicians, often the environmental ministers, often in central Asia. ‘I like the Stans,’ he would say.

In his frequent returns to California, he was much the same. For a while he pursued his ‘Ongoing Work Education program,’ Project OWE, because he owed it to his constituents to learn what their lives were like. Pronounced ow, however, by his staff, because of the injuries he incurred while taking on various jobs around the state for a month or three, working at them while continuing to function as senator in D.C., which irritated his colleagues no end. In that phase, he had worked as a grocery store bagger and check-out clerk, construction worker, real estate agent, plumber (or plumber’s helper as he joked), barrio textile seamstress, sewage maintenance worker, trash collector, stockbroker, and a celebrated stint as a panhandler in San Francisco, during which time he had slept at undisclosed locations in Golden Gate Park and elsewhere around the city, and asked for spare change for his political fund – part of his ‘spare change’ effort in which he had also asked Californian citizens to send in all the coins accumulating on their dressers, a startlingly successful plan that had weighed tons and netted him close to a million dollars, entirely funding his second run for senator, which he did on the cheap and mostly over the internet.

He had also walked from San Francisco to Los Angeles, climbed the Seven Summits (voting on the clean air bill from the top of Mt. Everest), swum from Catalina to the southern California mainland, and across Chesapeake Bay, and hiked the Appalachian trail from end to end. (‘Very boring,’ was his judgment. ‘Next time the PCT.’)

All these activities were extraneous to his work in the Senate, and time-consuming, and for his first two terms he was considered within the Beltway to be a celebrity freak, a party trick of a politician and a lightweight in the real world of power (i.e. money) no matter how far he could walk or swim. But even in that period his legislation had been interesting in concept (his contribution) and solidly written (his staff’s contribution), and cleverly pursued and promoted by all, with much more of it being enacted into law than was usual in the Senate. This was not noted by the press, always on the look-out for bad news and ephemera, but by his third term it began to become evident to insiders that he had been playing the insider game all along, and only pretending to be an outsider, so that his committee appointments were strong, and his alliances within the Democratic party apparatus finally strong, and across the aisle with moderate Republicans and McCain and other Vietnam vets, even stronger. He also had done a good job making his enemies, taking on flamboyantly bad senators like Winston and Reynolds and Hoof-in-mouth, whose subsequent falls from grace on corruption charges or simply failed policies had then retroactively confirmed his early judgments that these people were not just political dunderheads but also dangerous to the republic.

So ultimately, when the time came, everything he had done for twenty years and more turned out to have been as it were designed to prepare him not only for his successful run for the Presidency, but for his subsequent occupancy as well, a crucial point and something that many previous candidates obviously forgot. The world travel, the global network of allies and friends, the OWE program, the legislation he had introduced and gotten passed, his committee work – it all fit a pattern, as if he had had the plan from the start.

Which he totally denied; and his staff believed him. They thought in their gossip among themselves that they had seen him come to his decision to run just a year before the campaign (at about the same time, Charlie thought but never said aloud, that he had met for twenty minutes with the Khembali leaders). Whether he had harbored thoughts all along, no one really knew. No one could read his mind, and he had no close associates. Widowed; kids grown; friends kept private and out of town: to Washington he seemed as lonely and impenetrable as Reagan, or FDR, or Lincoln – all friendly and charming people, but distant in some basic way.

In any case he was in, and ready and willing to use the office as strong presidents do – not only as the executive branch of government, whipping on the other two to get things done, but also as a bully pulpit from which to address the citizens of the country and the rest of the world. His high positive/high negative pattern continued and intensified, with the debate over him in the States more polarized than ever, at least in the media. But in the world at large, his positives were higher than any American president’s since Kennedy. And interest was very high. All waited and watched through the few weeks left until his inauguration; there was a sudden feeling of stillness in the world, as if the pendulum swinging them all together helplessly this way and that had reached a height, and paused in space, just before falling the other way. People began to think that something might really happen.

It seemed to Frank that with such a president as Phil Chase coming into office, in theory it ought to be very interesting to be the presidential science advisor, or an advisor to the advisor. But there were aspects of the new job that were disturbing as well. It was going to mean increasing the distance between himself and the doing of science proper, and was therefore going to move him away from what he was good at. But that was what it meant to be moving into administration. Was there anyone who did policy well?

His intrusion on the Khembalis was another problem. Rudra’s failing health was a problem. His own injury, and the uncertain mentation that had resulted (if it had), was a very central problem – perhaps the problem. Leaving NSF, meaning Anna and the rest of his acquaintances and routines there (except for Edgardo and Kenzo, who were also joining Diane’s team) was a problem.

Problems required solutions, and solutions required decisions. And he couldn’t decide. So the days were proving difficult.

Because above and beyond all the rest of his problems, there was the absolutely immediate one: he had to – had to – had to – warn Caroline that her cover was insufficient to keep even a newcomer on the scene like Edgardo’s friend from locating her. He had to warn her of this! But he did not know where she was. She might be on that island in Maine, but unless he went and looked he couldn’t know. But if he went, he could not do anything that might expose her (and him too) to her husband. His van was chipped with a GPS transponder – Caroline was the one who had told him about it – so its identity and location could be under surveillance, and tracked wherever it went. He could easily imagine a program that would flag any time his van left the metropolitan area. This was a serious disadvantage, because his van was his shelter of last resort, his only mobile bedroom, and all in all, the most versatile room in the disassembled and modular home that he had cast through the fabric of the city.

‘Can I de-chip my van?’ he asked Edgardo next day on their run, after wanding them both again. ‘For certain? And, you know, as if by accident or malfunction?’

‘I should think so,’ Edgardo replied. ‘It might be something you would need some help with. Let me look into it.’

‘Okay, but I want to go soon.’

‘Up to Maine?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay, I’ll do my best. The person I want to talk to is not exactly on call. I have to meet them in a context like this one.’

But that night, as Frank was settling down in the garden shed with Rudra, who was already asleep, Qang came out to tell him there was a man there to see him. This caused Frank’s pulse to elevate to a disturbing degree –

But it was Edgardo, and a short man, who said ‘hello’ and after that spoke only to Edgardo, in Spanish. ‘Umberto here is another porteño,’ Edgardo said. ‘He helps me with matters such as this.’

Umberto rolled his eyes dramatically. He took Frank’s keys and went at the van as if he owned it, banging around, pulling up carpet from the floor, running various diagnostics through a laptop, complaining to Edgardo all the while. Eventually he opened the hood and after rooting around for a while, unbolted a small box from the crowded left engine wall. When he was done he gave the box to Frank and walked off into the dark, still berating Edgardo over his shoulder.

‘Thanks!’ Frank called after him. Then to Edgardo: ‘Did I see how he did that, so I can put it back in?’ He peered at the engine wall, then the bolts in his hand there with the box, then the holes the bolts had come out of. It looked like a wrench kit would do it. ‘Okay, but where do I put it now?’

‘You must leave it right here where it would be, so that it seems your van is parked here. Then replace it when you return.’

‘Out here on the street?’

‘Isn’t there a driveway to this house?’

‘Yeah, I can leave it there I guess. Buried in this gravel here.’

‘There you go.’

‘And other than that, I’m clean?’

‘That’s what Umberto said. Speaking only of the van, of course.’

‘Yeah. I’ve got the wand for my stuff. But is that enough? The van won’t look weird to toll gates for not having the box, or anything like that?’

‘No. Not every vehicle has these things yet. So far, the total information society is not yet fully online. When it is, you won’t be able to do stuff like this. You’ll never be able to get off the grid, and if you did it would look so strange it would be worse than being on the grid. Everything will have to be rethought.’

‘Jesus.’ Frank grimaced. ‘Well, by then I won’t be involved in this kind of stuff. Listen, I think I’m going to take off now and get a few hours of driving in. It’ll take me all of tomorrow to get there as it is.’

‘That’s true. Good luck my friend. Remember – no cell phone calls, no ATMs, no credit cards. Do you have enough cash with you?’

‘I hope so,’ feeling the thickness of his wallet.

‘You shouldn’t stay away too long anyway.’

‘No. I guess I’m okay, then. Thanks for the help.’

‘Good luck. Don’t call.’

Grumpily Frank got in his van and drove north on 95. Transponders embedded in every vehicle’s windshields … except would that really happen? Was this total information project not perhaps crazy enough to fail, ultimately? Or – could it be stopped? Could they go to Phil Chase and lay out the whole story, and get him to root out Caroline’s ex and his whole operation, whatever it was? Root it out from the top down? Were the spy agencies so imbricated into the fabric of the government (and the military) that they were beyond presidential control, or even presidential knowledge? Or inquiry?

If it weren’t for his going-off-grid status, he would have called up Edgardo to ask his opinion on this. As it was he could only continue to think, and worry, and drive.

Somewhere in New Jersey it occurred to him that as he was on the road north, he must therefore have decided to go. He had decided something! And without even trying. Maybe decisions now had to occur without one really noticing them happening, or wondering how. It was so hard to say. In this particular case, he really had had no choice; he had to warn her. So it had been more of a life override than a decision. Maybe one went through life doing the things one had to do, hooped by necessity, with decisions reserved for options and therefore not really a major factor in one’s life. A bad thought or a good one? He couldn’t tell.

A bad thought, he decided in the end. A bad thought in a long night of bad thoughts, as it turned out. Long past midnight he kept following the taillights ahead of him, and the traffic slowly thinned and became mostly trucks of various kinds. Over the Susquehanna, over the Hudson, otherwise tunneling on endlessly through the forest.

Finally he felt in danger of falling asleep at the wheel, got off and found a side road and a little parking lot, empty and dark and anonymous, where he felt comfortable parking under a tree and locking the doors and crawling into the back of the van to catch a few hours’ sleep.

Dawn’s light woke him and he drove on, north through New England, fueled by the worst 7–11 coffee he had ever tasted – coffee so bad it was good, in terms of waking him up. The idea that it might be poisoned gave him an extra jolt. Surely someone had poured in their battery acid as a prank. There was too much time to think. If Caroline was the boss, and her ex worked for her, then …

95 kept on coming, an endless slot through endless forest, a grass sward and two concrete strips rolling on for mile after mile. Finally he came to Bangor, Maine, and turned right, driving over hills and across small rivers, then through the standard array of franchises in Ellsworth, including an immense Wal-Mart. During the night he had driven north into full winter; a thin blanket of dirty snow covered everything. He passed a completely shut-down tourist zone, the motels, lobster shacks, antique stores, and miniature golf courses all looking miserable under their load of ice and snow, all except the Christmas knick-knack barn, which had a full parking lot and was bustling with festive shoppers.

Soon after that he crossed the bridge that spanned the tidal race to Mount Desert Island. By then the round gray tops of the island’s little range of peaks had appeared several times over the water of Frenchman’s Bay. They were lower than Frank had expected them to be, but still, they were bare rock mountain tops, shaved into graceful curves by the immense force of the Ice Age’s ice cap. Frank had googled the island on a cyber café’s rented computer, and had read quite a bit; and the information had surprised him in more ways than one. It turned out that this little island was in many ways the place where the American wilderness movement had begun, in the form of the landscape painter Frederick Church, who had come here in the 1840s to paint. In getting around the island, Church had invented what he called ‘rusticating,’ by which he meant wandering on mountainsides just for the fun of it. He also took offense at the clear-cut logging on the island, and worked to get the legislation of Maine to forbid it, in some of the nation’s first environmental legislature. All this was happening at the same time Emerson and Thoreau were writing. Something had been in the air.

Eventually all that led to the national park system, and Mount Desert Island had been the third one, the first east of the Mississippi, and the only one anywhere created by citizens donating their own land. Acadia National Park now took up about two-thirds of the island, in a patchwork pattern; when Frank drove over the bridge he was on private land, but most of the seaward part of the island belonged to the park.

He slowed down, deep in forest still, following instructions printed out from a map website. The Maine coast here faced almost south. The island was roughly square, and split nearly in half, east and west, by a fjord called Somes Sound. Caroline’s friend’s house was on the western half of the island.

Nervously Frank drove through Somesville, at the head of the sound. This turned out to be no more than a scattering of white houses, on snowy lawns on either side of the road. He looked for something like a village commercial center but did not find one.

Now he was getting quite nervous. Just the idea of seeing her. He didn’t know how to approach her. In his uncertainty he drove past the right turn that headed to her friend’s place, and continued on to a town called Southwest Harbor. He wanted to eat something, also to think things over.

In the only cafe still open he ordered a sandwich and espresso. He didn’t want to catch her unawares; that could be a bad shock. On the other hand there didn’t seem any other way to do it. Sitting in the cafe drinking espresso (heavenly after the battery acid), he ate his sandwich and tried to think. They were the same thoughts he had been thinking the whole drive. He would have to surprise her; hopefully he could immediately explain why he was there – the possible danger she was in – so that she did not jump to the conclusion that he was somehow stalking her. They could talk; he could see what she wanted to do, perhaps even help her move somewhere else, if that’s what she wanted. Although in that case …

Well, but he had run through all these thoughts a thousand times during the drive. All the scenarios led to a break point beyond which it was hard to imagine. He had to go to work on Monday. Or he should. And so …

He finished his lunch and walked around a little. Southwest Harbor’s harbor was a small bay surrounded by forested hills, and filled with working boats and working docks, also a small Coast Guard station out on the point to the left. It was quiet, icy, empty of people; picturesque, but in a good way. A working harbor.

He would have to risk dropping in on her. The wand said he was clean. Edgardo’s friend had said his van was clean. He had driven all night, he was five miles away from her. Surely the decision had already been made!

So he got back in his van, and drove back up the road to the Somesville fire station, where he took a left and followed a winding road through bare trees. Past an iced-over pond on the right, then another one on the left, this one a lake that was narrow and long, extending south for miles, a white flatness at the bottom of a classic U-shaped glacial slot. Pond’s End. Soon after that, a left turn onto a gravel road.

He drove slower than ever, under a dense network of overarching branches. Houses to the left were fronting the long frozen lake. Caroline’s friend’s place was on the right, where it would overlook a second arm of the lake. The map showed a Y-shaped lake, with the long arm straight, and the other shorter arm curving into it about halfway down.

Her friend’s house had no number in its driveway, but by the numbers before and after it, he deduced that it had to be the one. He turned around in a driveway, idled back up the road.

The place had a short gravel curve of driveway, with no cars in it. At the end of the driveway to the left stood a house, while to the right was a detached garage. Both were dark green with white trim. A car could have been hidden in the garage. Ah; the house number was there on the side of the garage.

He didn’t want to drive into the driveway. On the other hand it must look odd, him idling out on the road, looking in – if there was anyone there to see. He idled down the road farther, back in the direction of the paved road. Then he parked on the side at a wide spot, cursing under his breath. He got out and walked quickly down the road and up the driveway to the house in question.

He stopped between the house and the garage, under a big bare-limbed tree. The snow was crushed down to ice shards on the flagstones between the house and garage, as if someone had walked all over them and then there had been a thaw. No one was visible through the kitchen window. He was afraid to knock on the kitchen door. He stepped around the side of the house, looking in the windows running down that side. Inside was a big room, beyond it a sun porch facing the lake. The lake was down a slope from the house. There was a narrow path down, flanked by stone-walled terraces filled with snow and black weeds. Down on the water at the bottom of the path was a little white dock, anchored by a tiny white boathouse.

The door of the boathouse swung open from inside.

‘Caroline?’ Frank called down.

Silence. Then: ‘Frank?’

She peeked around the edge of the little boathouse, looking up for him with just the startled unhappy expression he had feared he would cause –

Then she almost ran up the path. ‘Frank, what is it?’ she exclaimed as she hurried up. ‘What are you doing here?’

He found he was already halfway down the path. They met between two blueberry bushes, him with a hand up as if in warning, but she crashed through that and embraced him – held him – hugged him. They clung to each other.

Frank had not allowed himself to think of this part (but he had anyway): what it meant to hold her. How much he had wanted to see her.

She pushed back from him, looking past him up to the house. ‘Why are you here? What’s going on? How did you find me?’

‘I needed to warn you about that,’ Frank said. ‘At least I thought I should. My friend at NSF, the one who helped me with the election disk you gave us? He has a friend who was looking into who your ex is, and what he’s doing now, you know, because they wanted to follow up on the election thing. So he wanted to talk to you about that, and my friend told him that you had disappeared, and this guy said that he knew where you probably were.’

‘Oh my God.’ Her hand flew to her mouth. Another body response common to all. She peered around him again up the driveway.

‘So, I wanted to see if he was right,’ Frank continued, ‘and I wanted to warn you if he was. And I wanted to see you, anyway.’

‘Yes.’ They held hands, then hugged again. Squeezed hard. Frank felt the fear and isolation in her.

‘So.’ He pulled back and looked at her. ‘Maybe you should move.’

‘Yeah. I guess so. Possibly. But – well, first tell me everything you can. Especially about how this person found me. Here, come on up. Let’s get inside.’ She led him by the hand, back up the garden path to the house.

She entered it by way of the sun porch door. The sun porch was separated from the living room by diamond-paned windows above a wainscoting. An old vacation home, Frank saw, hand made, scrupulously clean, with old furniture, and paintings on every wall that appeared to be the work of a single enthusiast. The view of the lake seemed the main attraction to Frank.

Caroline gestured around her. ‘I first visited my friend Mary here when we were six.’

‘Man.’

‘But we haven’t been in touch for years, and Ed never knew about her. I never told him. In fact, I can’t quite imagine how your friend’s friend tracked down the association.’

‘He said you called a number of an old roommate, and this was her place.’

She frowned. ‘That’s true.’

‘So, that’s how he tracked this place down. And if he could, so could your ex, presumably. And besides,’ he added sharply, surprising them both, ‘why did you tell me that he was your boss?’

Silence as she stared at him. He explained: ‘My friend’s friend said you were actually your husband’s boss. So I wanted to know.’

She glanced away, mouth tight for just an instant.

‘Come on,’ she said, and led him through the living room to the kitchen.

There she opened the refrigerator and got out a pitcher of iced tea. ‘Have a seat,’ she said, indicating the kitchen table.

‘Maybe I should move my van into the driveway,’ Frank remembered. ‘I didn’t want to shock you by driving in, and I left it out on the road.’

‘That was nice. Yeah, go move it in. At least for now.’

He did so, his mind racing. It was definitely foolish of her to remain exposed like this. Probably they should be leaving immediately.

He re-entered the kitchen to find her sitting at the table before two glasses of iced tea, looking down at the lake. His Caroline. He sat down across from her, took a drink.

She looked at him across the table. ‘I was not Ed’s boss,’ she said. ‘He was reassigned to another program. When I first came to the office, I was part of his team. I was working for him. But when the futures market program was established I was put in charge of it, and I reported to some people outside our office. Ed kept doing his own surveillance, and his group used what we were documenting, when they thought it would help them. That’s the way it was when you and I met. Then he moved again, like I told you, over to Homeland Security.’

She took a sip of her drink, met his eye again. ‘I never lied to you Frank. I never have and I never will. I’ve had enough of that kind of thing. More than you’ll ever know. I can’t stand it anymore.’

‘Good,’ Frank said, feeling awkward. ‘But tell me – I mean, this is another thing I’ve really wondered about, that I’ve never remembered to ask you – what were you doing on that boat during the big flood, on the Potomac?’

Surprised, she said, ‘That’s Ed’s boat. I was going up to get him off Roosevelt Island.’

‘That was quite a time to be out on the river.’

‘Yes, it was. But he was helping some folks at the marina get their boats off, and we had already taken a few down to below Alexandria, and on one of the trips he stayed behind to help free up a boat, while I ferried one of the groups downstream. So it was kind of back and forth.’

‘Ah.’ Frank put a hand onto the table, reaching toward her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know what to think. You know – we never have had much time. Whenever we’ve gotten together, there’s been more to say than time to say it.’

She smiled. ‘Too busy with other stuff.’ And she put her hand on his.

He turned his palm up, and they intertwined fingers, squeezed hands. This was a whole different category of questions and answers. Do you still love me? Yes, I still love you. Do you still want me? Yes, I still want you. Yes. All that he had felt briefly before, during that hard hug on the garden path, was confirmed.

Frank took a deep breath. A flow of calmness spread from his held hand up his arm and then through the rest of him. Most of him.

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘We’ve never had enough time. But now we do, so – tell me more. Tell me everything.’

‘Okay. But you too.’

‘Sure.’

But then they sat there, and it seemed too artificial just to begin their life histories or whatever. They let their hands do the talking for a while instead. They drank tea. She began to talk a little about coming to this place when she was a girl. Then about being a jock, as she put it – how Frank loved that – and how that had gotten her into various kinds of trouble, somehow. ‘Maybe it was a matter of liking the wrong kind of guys. Guys who are jocks are not always nice. There’s a certain percentage of assholes, and I could never tell in time.’ Reading detective stories when she was a girl. Nancy Drew and Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, all of them leading her down the garden path toward intelligence, first at the CIA (‘I wish I had never left’), then to a promotion, or what had seemed like a promotion, over to Homeland Security. That was where she had met Ed. The way at first he had seemed so calm, so capable, and in just the areas she was then getting interested in. The intriguing parts of spook work. The way it had let her be outdoors, or at least out and about – at first. Like a kind of sport. ‘Ah yeah,’ Frank put in, thinking of the fun of tracking animals. ‘I did jobs like that too, sometimes. I wanted that too.’

Then the ways things had changed, and gone wrong, in both work and marriage. How bad it had gotten. Here she grew vague and seemed to suppress some agitation or grimness. She kept looking out the window, as did Frank. A car passed and they both were too distracted by it to go on.

‘Anyway, then you and I got stuck in the elevator,’ she resumed. She stopped, thinking about that perhaps; shook her head, looked out the kitchen window at the driveway again. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said abruptly. ‘I don’t like … Why don’t we go for a drive in your van. I can show you some of the island, and I can get some time to think things through. I can’t think here right now. It’s giving me the creeps that you’re here, I mean in the sense of … And we can put your van someplace else, if I decide to come back here. You know. Just in case. I actually have my car parked down at the other end of the lake. I’ve been sailing down to it when I want to drive somewhere.’

‘Sailing?’

‘Iceboating.’

‘Ah. Okay,’ Frank said. They got up. ‘But – do you think we even ought to come back here?’

She frowned. He could see she was getting irritated or upset. His arrival had messed up what she had thought was a good thing. Her refuge. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said uneasily. ‘I don’t think Ed will ever be able to find that one call I made to Mary. I made it from a pay phone I’ve never used before or since.’

‘But – if he’s searching for something? For an old connection?’

‘Yes, I know.’ She gave him an odd look. ‘I don’t know. Let’s get going. I can think about it better when I get away from here.’

He saw that it was as he had feared; to her, his arrival was simply bad news. He wondered for a second if she had planned ever to contact him again.

They walked up the road to Frank’s van, and he drove them back toward Somesville, following her instructions. She looked into all the cars going past them the other way. They drove around the head of the sound, then east through more forests, past more lakes.

Eventually she had him park at a feature called Bubble Rock, which turned out to be a big glacial erratic, perched improbably on the side of a polished granite dome. Frank looked at the rocky slopes rising to both sides of the road, amazed; he had never seen granite on the east coast before. It was as if a little patch of the Sierra Nevada had been detached by a god and cast over to the Atlantic. The granite was slightly pinker than in the Sierra, but otherwise much the same.

‘Let’s go up the Goat Trail,’ she said. ‘You’ll like it, and I need to do something.’

She led him along the road until it reached a frozen lake just under the South Bubble, then crossed the road and stood facing the steep granite slope flanking this long lake.

‘That’s Jordan Pond, and this is Pemetic Mountain’ – gesturing at the slope above them. ‘And somewhere here is the start of the Goat Trail.’ She walked back and forth, scanning the broken jumble of steep rock looming over them. A very unlikely spot to begin a trail. The pink-gray granite was blackened with lichen, had the same faulted structure as any granite wall shaved by a glacier. In this case the ice resting on it had been a mile thick.

‘My friend’s father was really into the trails on the island, and he took us out and told us all about them,’ Caroline said. ‘Ah ha.’ She pointed at a rusted iron rod protruding from a big slab of rock, about head high. She started up past it, using her hands for balance and the occasional extra pull up. ‘This was the first one, he said. It’s more of a marked route than a real trail. It’s not on the maps anymore. See, there’s the next trail duck.’ Pointing above.

‘Ah yeah.’ Frank followed, watching her. This was his Caroline. She climbed with a sure touch. They had never done anything normal together before. She had talked about being a bicyclist, going for runs. This slope was easy but steep, and in places icy. A jock. Suddenly he felt the Caroline surge that had been there waiting in him all along.

Then the dark rock reared up into a wall of broken battlements thirty or forty feet high, one atop the next. Caroline led the way up through breaks in these walls, following a route marked by small stacks of flat rocks. In one of these gullies the bottom of the crack was filled with big flat stones set on top of each other in a rough but obvious staircase; this was as much of a trail as Frank had yet seen. ‘Mary’s father wouldn’t even step on those stones,’ Caroline said, and laughed. ‘He said it would be like stepping on a painting or something. A work of art. We used to laugh so much at him.’

‘I should think the guy who made the trail would like it to be used.’

‘Yes, that’s what we said.’

As they ascended they saw three or four more of these little staircases, always making a hard section easier. After an hour or so the slope laid back in a graceful curve, and they were on the rounded top of the hill. Pemetic Mountain, said a wooden sign on a post stuck into a giant pile of stones. 1,247 feet.

The top was an extensive flat ridge, running south toward the ocean. Its knobby bare rock was interspersed with low bushes and sandy patches. Lichen of several different colors spotted the bedrock and the big erratics left on the ridge by the ice – some granite, others schist. Exposed rock showed glacial scouring and some remaining glacial polish. It resembled any such knob in the Sierra, although the vegetation was a bit more lush. But the air had a distinct salt tang, and off to the south was the vast plate of the ocean, blue as could be, starting just a couple miles away at the foot of the ridge. Amazing. Forested islands dotted the water offshore; wisps of fog lay farther out to sea. To the immediate right and left rose other mountain tops, all rounded to the same whaleback shape. The peaks to both east and west were higher than this one, and the biggest one, to the east, had a road running up its side, and a number of radio towers poking up through its summit forest. The ice cap had carved deep slots between the peaks, working down into fault lines in the granite between each dome. Behind them, to the north, lay the forested low hills of Maine, trees green over snowy ground.

‘Beautiful,’ Frank said. ‘It’s mountains and ocean both. I can’t believe it.’

Caroline gave him a hug. ‘I was hoping you would like it.’

‘Oh yes. I didn’t know the east coast had such a place as this.’

‘There’s nowhere else quite like it,’ she said.

They hugged for so long it threatened to become something else; then they separated and wandered the peak plateau for a while. It was cold in the wind, and Caroline shivered and suggested they return. ‘There’s a real trail down the northeast side, the Ravine Trail. It goes down a little cut in the granite.’

‘Okay.’

They headed off the northeast shoulder of the hill, and were quickly down into scrubby trees. Here the ice had hit the rock head on, and the enormous pressures had formed the characteristic upstream side of a drumlin: smooth, rounded, polished, any flaw stripped open. And exposed to air for no more than ten thousand years; thus there was hardly any soil on this slope, which meant all the trees on it were miniaturized. They hiked down a good trail through this krummholz like giants.

It was a familiar experience for Frank, and yet this time he was following the lithe and graceful figure of his lover or girlfriend or he didn’t know what, descending neatly before him, like a tree goddess. Some kind of happiness or joy or desire began to seep under his worry. Surely it had been a good idea to come here. He had had to do it; he couldn’t have not done it.

The trail led them into the top of a narrow couloir in the granite, a flaw from which all loose rock had been plucked. Cedar beams were set crosswise in the bottom of this ravine, forming big solid stairs, somewhat snowed over. The sidewalls were covered with lichen, moss, ice. When they came out of the bottom of the couloir, the stairboxes underfoot were replaced by a long staircase of immense rectangular granite blocks.

‘This is more like the usual trail on the east side,’ Caroline said, pointing at these monstrous field stones. ‘For a while, the thing they liked to do was make granite staircases, running up every fault line they could find. Sometimes there’ll be four or five hundred stairs in a row.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No. Every peak on the east side has three or four trails like that running up them, sometimes right next to each other. The redundancy didn’t bother them at all.’

‘So they really were works of art.’

‘Yes. But the National Park didn’t get it, and when they took over they closed a lot of the trails and took them off the maps. But since the trails have these big staircases in them, they last whether they’re maintained or not. Mary’s dad collected old maps, and was part of a group that went around finding the old trails. Now the park is restoring some of them.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘I don’t think there is anything like it. Even here they only did this for a few years. It was like a fad. But a fad in granite never goes away.’

Frank laughed. ‘It looks like something the Incas might have done.’

‘It does, doesn’t it?’ She stopped and looked back up the snowy stone steps, splotchy here with pale green lichen.

‘I can see why you would want to stay here,’ Frank said cautiously when they started again.

‘Yes. I love it.’

‘But …’

‘I think I’m okay,’ she said.

For a while they went back and forth on this, saying much the same things they had said at the house. Whether Ed would look at her subjects, whether he would be able to find Mary …

Finally Frank shrugged. ‘You don’t want to leave here.’

‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I like it here. And I feel hidden.’

‘But now you know better. Someone looked for you and they found you. That’s got to be the main thing.’

‘I guess,’ she muttered.

They came to the road they had parked beside. They walked back to his van and she had him drive south, down the shore of Jordan Pond.

‘Some of my first memories are from here,’ she said, looking out the window at the lake. ‘We came almost every summer. I always loved it. That lasted for several years, I’d guess, but then her parents got divorced and I stopped seeing her, and so I stopped coming.’

‘Ah.’

‘So, we did start college together and roomed that first year, but to tell the truth, I hadn’t thought of her for years. But when I was thinking about how to really get away, if I ever wanted to, I remembered it. I never talked to Ed about Mary, and I just made the one call to her here from a pay phone.’

‘What did you say to her?’

‘I gave her the gist of the situation. She was willing to let me stay.’

‘That’s good. Unless, you know … I just don’t know. I mean, you tell me just how dangerous these guys are. Some shots were fired that night in the park, after you left. My friends were the ones who started it, but your ex and his friends definitely shot back. And so, given that …’

Now she looked appalled. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Yeah. I also … I threw a rock at your ex,’ he added lamely.

‘You what?’

‘I threw my hand axe at him. I saw a look on his face I didn’t like, and I just did it.’

She squeezed his hand. Her face had the grim inward expression it took on whenever she was thinking about her ex. ‘I know that look,’ she muttered. ‘I hate it too.’ And then: ‘I’m sorry I’ve gotten you into this.’

‘No. Anyway, I missed him. Luckily. But he saw the rock go by his head, or felt it. He took off running down the Metro stairs. So he definitely knows something is up.’ Frank didn’t mention going by their apartment afterward and ringing the doorbell; he was already embarrassed enough about the hand axe. ‘So, what I’m still worried about is if he starts looking, and, you know, happens to replicate what my friend’s friend did.’

‘I know.’ She sighed. ‘I guess I’m hoping that he’s not all that intent on me anymore. I have him chipped, and he’s always in D.C., at the office, moving from room to room. I’ve got him covered in a number of ways – a spot cam on our apartment entry, and things like that, and he seems to be following his ordinary routine.’

‘Even so – he could be doing that while sending some of his team here to check things out.’

She thought about it. Sighed a big sigh. ‘I hate to leave here when there might not be a reason to.’

Frank said nothing; his presence was itself proof of a reason. Thus his appearance had indeed been a bad thing. The transitive law definitely applied to emotions.

She had directed him through some turns, and now they were driving around the head of Somes Sound again, back toward her place. As he slowed through Somesville, he said, ‘Where should we put my van?’

She ran her hands through her short curls, thinking it over. ‘Let’s put it down where my car is. I’m parked at the south end of Long Pond, at the pump house there. First drop me off at the house, then drive down there, and I’ll sail down on the iceboat and pick you up.’

So he turned at the firehouse, drove to her camp and dropped her off at the house, feeling nervous as he did so. Then he followed her instructions, back toward Southwest Harbor, then west through the forest again, on a winding small road. He only had a rough sense of where he was, but then he was driving down an incline, and the smooth white surface of Long Pond appeared through the trees. The southern end of its long arm was walled on both sides by steep granite slopes, six or seven hundred feet high: a pure glacial U, floored by a lake.

He parked in the little parking lot by the pump house and got out. The wind from the north slammed him in the face. Far up the lake he saw a tiny sail appear as if out of the rock wall to the left. It looked like a big windsurfing sail. Faster than he would have thought possible it grew larger, and the iceboat swept up to the shore, Caroline at the tiller, turning it in a neat curlicue at the end, to lose speed and drift backwards to shore.

‘Amazing,’ Frank said.

‘Here, wait – park your van up in those trees, just past the stop sign up there.’

Frank did so and then returned to the craft, stepped in and stowed his daypack before the mast. The iceboat was a wooden triangular thing, obviously handmade, more like a big soap box derby car than a boat. Three heavy struts extended from the cockpit box, one ahead and two sideways and back from the cockpit. It was an odd-looking thing, but the mast and sails seemed to have been scavenged from an ordinary sloop, and Caroline was obviously familiar with it. Her face was flushed with the wind, and she looked pleased in a way Frank had never seen before. She pulled the sail taut and twisted the tiller, which set the angles of the big metal skates out at the ends of the rear struts, and with a clatter they gained speed and were off in a chorus of scraping.

The iceboat did not heel in the wind, but when gusts struck it merely squeaked and slid along even faster, the skates making a loud clattery hiss. When a really strong gust hit, the craft rocketed forward with a palpable jolt. Frank’s eyes watered heavily under the assault of the wind. He ducked when Caroline told him to, their heads together as the boom swung over them as part of a big curving tack. To get up the narrow lake against the wind they would have to tack a lot; the craft did not appear able to hold too close to the wind.

As they worked their way north, Caroline explained that Mary’s grandfather had built the iceboat out of wood left over from when he had built the garage. ‘He built everything there, even some of the furniture. He dug out the cellar, built the chimney, the terraces, the dock and rowboats …’ Mary’s father had told them about this; Caroline had met the grandfather only once, when she was very young.

‘This last month I’ve been feeling like he’s still around the place, like a ghost, but in the best kind of way. The first night I got here the electricity wasn’t on and there was no sound at all. I never realized how used to noise we’ve gotten. That there’s always some kind of sound, even if it’s only the refrigerator.’

‘Usually it’s a lot more than that,’ Frank said, thinking of how D.C. sounded from his treehouse.

‘Yes. But this time it was completely quiet. I began to hear myself breathing. I could even hear my heart beat. And then there was a loon on the lake. It was so beautiful. And I thought of Mary’s grandfather building everything, and it seemed like he was there. Not a voice, just part of the house somehow. It was comforting.’

‘Good for him,’ Frank said. He liked the sound of such a moment, also the fact that she had noticed it. It occurred to him again how little he knew her. She was watching the ice ahead of the boat, holding the boom line and the tiller in place, making small adjustments, splayed in the cockpit as if holding a kind of dance position with the wind. And there they were barreling across the frozen surface of the lake, the ice blazing in a low tarnished sun that was smeared out in long bars of translucid cloud – the wind frigid, and flying through him as if the gusts were stabs of feeling for her – for the way she was capable, the way she liked it out here. He had thought she would be like this, but they had spent so little time together he could not be sure. But now he was seeing it. His Caroline, real in the sunlight and the wind. A gust of wind was a surge of feeling.

She brought the iceboat around again, east to west, and continued the smooth curve west, as they were now shooting into the channel that began the other arm of the lake’s Y. Here the north wind was somewhat blocked by the peninsula separating the two arms of the lake, and the ice boat slid along with less speed and noise. Then another curve, and they were headed into the wind again, on the short arm of the Y, running up to a little island she called Rum Island, which turned out to be just a round bump of snow and trees in the middle of a narrow part of the lake.

As they were about to pass Rum Island, something beeped in Caroline’s jacket pocket. ‘Shit!’ she said, and snatched out a small device, like a handheld GPS or a cell phone. She steered with a knee while she held it up to her face to see it in the sunlight. She cursed again. ‘Someone’s at camp.’

She swerved, keeping Rum Island between the boat and Mary’s place. As they approached the island she turned into the wind and let loose the sail, so that they skidded into a tiny cove and onto a gravel beach no bigger than the ice boat itself. They stepped over the side onto icy gravel, and tied the boat to a tree, then made their way to the island’s other side. The trees on the island hooted and creaked like the Sierras in a storm, a million pine needles whooshing their great chorale. It was strange to see the lake surface perfectly still and white under the slaps of such a hard blow.

Across that white expanse, the green house and its little white boathouse were the size of postage stamps. Caroline had binoculars in the boat, however, and through them the house’s lake side was quite distinct; and through its big windows there was movement.

‘Someone inside.’

‘Yes.’

They crouched behind a big schist erratic. Caroline took the binoculars back from him and balanced them on the rock, then bent over and looked through them for a long time. ‘It looks like Andy and George,’ she said in a low voice, as if they might overhear. ‘Uh oh – get down,’ and she pulled him down behind the boulder. ‘There’s a couple more up by the house, with some kind of scope. Can those IR glasses you use for the animals see heat this far away?’

‘Yes,’ Frank said. He had often used IR when tracking the ferals in Rock Creek. He took the binoculars back from her and looked around the side of the boulder near the ground, with only one lens exposed.

There they were – looking out toward the island – then hustling down the garden path and onto the ice itself, their long dark overcoats flapping in the wind. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘they’re coming over here to check! They must have seen our heat.’

‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘Let’s go, then.’

They ran back over the little island to the beach. A hard kick from Caroline to the hull of the ice boat and it was off the gravel and ready to sail. Push it around, get in and take off, waiting helplessly for the craft to gain speed, which it did with an icy scratching that grew louder as they slid out from the island’s wind shadow and skidded south.

‘You saw four of them?’ Frank asked.

‘Yes.’

Skating downwind did not feel as fast as crossing it had, but then they passed the end of the peninsula between the two arms of the lake, and Caroline steered the craft in another broad curve, and as she did it picked up speed until it shot across the ice, into the gap leading to the longer stretch of the lake. Looking back, Frank saw the men crossing the lake. They saw him; one of them took a phone from his jacket pocket and held it to his ear. Back at the house, tiny now, he saw the two others running around the back of the house.

Then the point of the peninsula blocked the view.

‘The ones still at the house went for the driveway,’ he said. ‘They’re going to drive around the lake, I bet. Do you think they can get to the southern end of the lake before we do?’

‘Depends on the wind,’ Caroline said. ‘Also, they might stop at Pond’s End, for a second at least, to take a look and see if we’re coming up to that end.’

‘But it wouldn’t make sense for us to do that.’

‘Unless we had parked there. But they’ll only stop a second, because they’ll be able to see us. You can see all the way down the lake. So they’ll see which way we’re going.’

‘And then?’

‘I think we can beat them. They’ll have to circle around on the roads. If the wind holds, I’m sure we can beat them.’

The craft emerged from the channel onto the long stretch of the lake, where the wind was even stronger. Looking through the binoculars as best he could given the chatter, Frank saw a dark van stop at the far end of the pond, then, after a few moments’ pause, drive on.

He had made the same drive himself a couple of hours before, and it seemed to him it had taken about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, to get to the south end of the pond by way of the small roads through the woods. But he hadn’t been hurrying. At full speed it might take only half that.

But now the iceboat had the full force of the north wind behind it, funneling down the steep granite walls to both sides – and the gusts felt stronger than ever, even though they were running straight downwind. The boat only touched the ice along the edges of the metal runners, screeching their banshee trio. Caroline’s attention was fixed on the sail, her body hunched at the tiller and line, feeling the wind like a telegraph operator. Frank didn’t disturb her, but only sat on the gunwale opposite to the sail, as she had told him to do. The stretch of the lake they had to sail looked a couple of miles long. In a sailboat they would have been in trouble. On the ice, however, they zipped along as if in a catamaran’s dream, almost frictionless despite the loud noise of what friction was left. Frank guessed they were going about twenty miles an hour, maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty; it was hard to tell. Fast enough: down a granite wind tunnel, perfectly shaped to their need for speed. The dwarf trees on the steep granite slopes to each side bounced and whistled, the sun was almost blocked by the western cliff, blazing in the pale streaked sky, whitening the cloud to each side of it. Caroline spared a moment to give Frank a look, and it seemed she was going to speak, then shook her head and simply gestured at the surrounding scene, mouth tight. Frustrated. It was magnificent; but they were on the run.

‘I guess them showing up so soon suggests I tipped them off somehow,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ She was looking at the sail.

‘I’m sorry. I thought I needed to warn you.’

Her mouth stayed tight. She said nothing.

The minutes dragged, but Frank’s watch showed that only eight had passed when they came to the south end of the lake. There were a couple of big houses tucked back in the forest to the left. Caroline pulled the tiller and boom line and brought them into the beach next to the pump house, executing a bravura late turn that hooked so hard Frank was afraid the iceboat might be knocked on its side. Certainly a windsurfer or catamaran would have gone down like a bowling pin. But there was nothing for the iceboat to do but groan and scrape and spin, into the wind and past it, then screeching back, then stopping, then drifting back onto the beach.

‘Hurry,’ Caroline said, and jumped out and ran up to Frank’s van.

Frank followed. ‘What about the boat?’

She grimaced. ‘We have to leave it!’ Then, when they were in his van: ‘I’ll call Mary when I can get a clean line and tell her where it is. I’d hate for Harold’s boat to be lost because of this shit.’ Her voice was suddenly vicious.

Then she was all business, giving Frank directions; they got out to a paved road and turned right, and Frank accelerated as fast as he dared on the still frozen road, which was often in shadow, and seemed a good candidate for black ice. When they came to a T-stop she had him turn right. ‘My car’s right there, the black Honda. I’m going to take off.’

‘Where?’

‘I’ve got a place. I’ve got to hurry, I don’t want them to see me at the bridge. You should head directly for the bridge and get off the island. Go back home.’

‘Okay,’ Frank said. He could feel himself entering one of his indecision fugues, and was grateful she had such a strong sense of what they should do. ‘Look, I’m sorry about this. I thought I had to warn you.’

‘I know. It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault. It was good of you to try to help. I know why you did it.’ And she leaned over and gave him a quick peck of a kiss before she got out.

‘I was pretty sure my van is clean,’ Frank said. ‘And my stuff too. We checked all of it out.’

‘They may have you under other kinds of surveillance. Satellite cameras, or people just tailing you.’

‘Satellite cameras? Is that possible?’

‘Of course.’ Annoyed that he could be so ignorant.

Frank shrugged, thinking it over. He would have to ask Edgardo. Right now he was glad she was giving him directions.

She came around the van and leaned in on his side. Frank could see she was angry.

‘You’ll be able to come back here someday,’ he said.

‘I hope so.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘instead of holing up somewhere, you could stay with people who would keep you hidden, and cover for you.’

‘Like Anne Frank?’

Startled, Frank said, ‘Well, I guess so.’

She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t stand it. And I wouldn’t want to put anyone else to the trouble.’

‘Well, but what about me? I’m staying with the Khembalis in almost that way already. They’re very helpful, and their place is packed with people.’

Again she shook her head. ‘I’ve got a Plan C, and it’s down in that area. Once I get into that I can contact you again.’

‘If we can figure out a clean system.’

‘Yes. I’ll work on that. We can always set up a dead drop.’

‘My friends from the park live all over the city –’

‘I’ve got a plan!’ she said sharply.

‘Okay.’ He shook his head, swallowed; tasted blood at the back of his throat.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ he said automatically.

‘Something,’ she said, and reached in to touch the side of his head. ‘Tell me what you just thought. Tell me quick, I’ve got to go, but I didn’t like that look!’

He told her about it as briefly as he could. Taste of blood. Inability to make decisions. Maybe it was sounding like he was making excuses for coming up to warn her. She was frowning. When he was done, she shook her head.

‘Frank? Go see a doctor.’

‘I know.’

‘Don’t say that! I want you to promise me. Make the appointment, and then go see the doctor.’

‘Okay. I will.’

‘All right, now I’ve got to go. I think they’ve got you chipped. Be careful and go right back home. I’ll be in touch.’

‘How?’

She grimaced. ‘Just go!’

A phrase which haunted him as he made the long drive south. Back to home; back to work; back to Diane. Just go!

He could not seem to come to grips with what had happened. The island was dreamlike in the way it was so vivid and surreal, but detached from any obvious meaning. Heavily symbolic of something that could nevertheless not be decoded. They had hugged so hard, and yet had never really kissed; they had climbed together up a rock wall, they had ice-boated on a wild wind, and yet in the end she had been angry, perhaps with him, and holding back from saying things, it had seemed. He wasn’t sure.

Mile after mile winged by, minute after minute; on and on they went, by the tens, then the hundreds. And as night fell, and his world reduced to a pattern of white and red lights, both moving and still, with glowing green signs and their white lettering providing name after name, his feel for his location on the globe became entirely theoretical to him, and everything grew stranger and stranger. Some kind of fugue state, the same thoughts over and over. Obsession without compulsion. Headlights in the rear-view mirror; who could tell if they were from the same vehicle or not?

It became hard to believe there was anything outside the lit strip of the highway. Once Kenzo had shown him a USGS map of the United States that had displayed the human population as raised areas, and on that map the 95 corridor had been like an immense Himalaya from Atlanta to Boston, rising from both directions to the Everest that was New York. And yet driving right down the spine of this great density of his species he could see nothing but the walls of trees lining both sides of the endless slot. He might as well have been driving south though Siberia, or over the face of some empty forest planet, tracking some great circle route that was only going to bring him back where he had started. The forest hid so much.

Despite the re-established Gulf Stream, the jet stream still snaked up and down the Northern Hemisphere under its own pressures, and now a strong cold front rode it south from Hudson Bay and arrived just in time to strike the inauguration. When the day dawned, temperatures in the capital region hovered around zero degrees Fahrenheit, with clear sunny skies and a north wind averaging fifteen miles an hour. Everyone out of doors had to bundle up, so it was a slow process at all the security checkpoints. The audience settled onto the cold aluminum risers set on the east side of the Capitol, and Phil Chase and his entourage stepped onto the dais, tucked discreetly behind its walls of protective glass. The cold air and Phil’s happy, relaxed demeanor reminded Charlie of the Kennedy inauguration, and images of JFK and Earl Warren and Robert Frost filled his mind as he felt Joe kicking him in the back. He had only been a few years older than Joe when he had seen that one on TV. Thus the generations span the years, and now his boy was huddled against him, heavy as a rock, dragging him down but keeping him warm. ‘Dad, let’s go to the zoo! Wanna go to the zoo!’

‘Okay, Joe, but after this, okay? This is history!’

‘His story?’

Phil stood looking out at the crowd after the oath of office was administered by the Chief Justice, a man about ten years younger than he was. With a wave of his gloved hand he smiled his beautiful smile.

‘Fellow Americans,’ he said, pacing his speech to the reverb of the loudspeakers, ‘you have entrusted me with the job of president during a difficult time. The crisis we face now, of abrupt climate change and crippling damage to the biosphere, is a very dangerous one, to be sure. But we are not at war with anyone, and in fact we face a challenge that all humanity has to meet together. On this podium, Franklin Roosevelt said, “This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.” Now it’s true again. We are the generation that has to deal with the profound destruction that will be caused by the global warming that has already been set in motion. The potential disruption of the natural order is so great that scientists warn of a mass extinction event. Losses on that scale would endanger all humanity, and so we cannot fail to address the threat. The lives of our children, and all their descendants, depend on us doing so.

‘So, like FDR and his generation, we have to face the great challenge of our time. We have to use our government to organize a total social response to the problem. That took courage then, and we will need courage now. In the years since we used our government to help get us out of the Great Depression, it has sometimes been fashionable to belittle the American government as some kind of foreign burden laid on us. That attitude is nothing more than an attack on American history, deliberately designed to shift power away from the American people. I want us to remember how Abraham Lincoln said it: “that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this Earth.” This is the crucial concept of American democracy – that government expresses what the majority of us would like to do as a society. It’s us. We do it to us and for us. I believe this reminder is so important that I intend to add the defining phrase “of the people, by the people, and for the people” every time I use the word “government,” and I intend to do all I can to make that phrase be a true description. It will make me even more long-winded than I was before, but I am willing to pay that price, and you are going to have to pay it with me.

‘So, this winter, with your approval and support, I intend to instruct my team in the executive branch of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, to initiate a series of federal actions and changes designed to meet the problem of global climate change head-on. We will deal with it as a society working together, and working with the rest of the world. It’s a global project, and so I will go to the United Nations and tell them that the United States is ready to join the international effort. We will also help the underdeveloped world to develop using clean technology, so that all the good aspects of development will not be drowned in its bad side-effects – often literally drowned. In our own country, meanwhile, we will do all it takes to shift to clean technologies as quickly as possible.’

Phil paused to survey the crowd. ‘My, it’s cold out here today! You can feel right now, right down to the bone, that what I am saying is true. We’re out in the cold, and we need to change the way we do things. And it’s not just a technological problem, having to do with our machinery alone. The devastation of the biosphere is also a result of there being too many human beings for the planet to support over the long haul. If the human population continues to increase as it has risen in the past, all progress we might make will be overwhelmed.

‘But what is very striking to observe is that everywhere on this Earth where good standards of justice prevail, the rate of reproduction is about at the replacement rate. While wherever justice, and the full array of rights as described in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, is somehow denied to some portion of the population, especially to women and children, the rate of reproduction either balloons to unsustainably rapid growth rates, or crashes outright. Now you can argue all you want about why this correlation exists, but the correlation itself is striking and undeniable. So this is one of those situations in which what we do for good in one area, helps us again in another. It is a positive feedback loop with the most profound implications. Consider: for the sake of climate stabilization, there must be population stabilization; and for there to be population stabilization, justice must prevail. Every person on the planet must live with the full array of human rights that all nations have already ascribed to when signing the U.N. Charter. When we achieve that, at that point, and at that point only, we will begin to reproduce at a sustainable rate.

‘To help that to happen, I intend to make sure that the United States joins the global justice project fully, unequivocally, and without any double standards. This means accepting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and the jurisdiction of the World Court in the Hague. It means abiding by all the clauses of the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions, which after all we have already signed. It means supporting U.N. peace-keeping forces, and supporting the general concept of the U.N. as the body through which international conflicts get resolved. It means supporting the World Health Organization in all its reproductive rights and population reduction efforts. It means supporting women’s education and women’s rights everywhere, even in cultures where men’s tyrannies are claimed to be some sort of tradition. All these commitments on our part will be crucial if we are serious about building a sustainable world. There are three legs to this effort, folks: technology, environment, and social justice. None of the three can be neglected.

‘So, some of what we do may look a little unconventional at first. And it may look more than a little threatening to those few who have been trying, in effect, to buy our government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and use it to line their own pockets while the world goes smash. But you know what? Those people need to change too. They’re out in the cold the same as the rest of us. So we will proceed, and hope those opposed come to see the good in it.

‘Ultimately we will be exploring all peaceful means to initiate positive changes in our systems, in order to hand on to the generations to come a world that is as beautiful and bountiful as the one we were born into. We are only the temporary stewards of a mighty trust, which includes the lives of all the future generations to come. We are responsible to our children and theirs. What we do now will reveal much about our character and our values as a people. We have to rise to the occasion, and I think we can and will. I am going to throw myself into the effort whole-heartedly and with a feeling of high excitement, as if beginning a long journey over stormy seas.’

‘Good,’ Charlie said into his phone. ‘He’s still saying the right stuff.’

‘Heck yes,’ Roy replied in his ear. ‘But you know the old saying: an ounce of law is worth a pound of rhetoric.’ Roy had made up this saying, and trotted it out as often as possible. He was seated on the opposite side of the viewing stands from Charlie and Joe, and Charlie thought he could just spot him talking into his cell phone across the way, but with all the hats and mufflers and ski masks bundling the heads of the audience, he could not be sure. Roy continued, ‘We’ll see if we can wag the dog or not. Things bog down in this town.’

‘I think the dog will wag us,’ Charlie said. ‘I think we are the dog. We’re the dog of the people, by the people and for the people.’

‘We’ll see.’ As chief of staff, Roy had already worked so hard on the transition that he had, Charlie feared, lost all sight of the big picture: ‘Everything depends on how the start goes.’

Charlie said, ‘A good start would help. But whatever happens, we have to persevere. Right, Joe?’

‘Go Phil! Hey, Dad? It’s cold.’

The transition team had concocted its ‘first sixty days’ – a gigantic master list of Things To Do, parceled out among the many agencies of the executive branch. Each agency had its own transition team and its own list, which usually began with a status report. Many units had been deliberately disabled by previous administrations, so that they would require a complete retooling to be able to function. In others, change at the top would rally the efforts of the remaining permanent staff, made up of professional technocrats. Each agency had to be evaluated for these problems and qualities, and the amount of attention given to them adjusted accordingly.

For Charlie, this meant working full time, as he had agreed back in November. Everyone else was up to speed and beyond, and he felt an obligation to match them. Up before sunrise, therefore, groggy in the cold dark of the depths of winter, when (Frank said) hominids living this far north had used to go into a dream state very close to hibernation. Get Joe up, or at least transferred sleeping into his stroller. Quick walk with Anna down to the Metro station in Bethesda – companionable, as if they were still in bed together, or sharing a dream; Charlie could almost fall back asleep on such a walk. Then descend with her into the Earth, dimly lit and yet still lighter than the pre-dawn world above. Slump in a bright vinyl seat and snooze against Anna to Metro Center, where she changed trains and they went up in elevators to the sidewalk, to have a last brisk walk together, Joe often awake and babbling, down G Street to the White House. There pass through security, more quickly each time, and down to the daycare center, where Joe bounced impatiently in his stroller until he could clamber over the side and plow off into the fun. He was always one of the first kids there and one of the last to leave, and that was saying a lot. But he did not remark on this, and did not seem to mind. He was still nice to the other kids. Indeed the various teachers all told Charlie how well he got along with the other kids.

Charlie found these reports depressing. He could see with his own eyes the beginning and end of Joe’s days in daycare, but there weren’t as many kids there at those times. And he remembered Gymboree, indeed had been traumatized by certain incidents at Gymboree.

Now, as everyone pointed out, Joe was calm to the point of detachment. Serene. In his own space. In the daycare he looked somewhat like he would have been during a quiet moment on the floor of their living room at home; perhaps a bit more wary. It worried Charlie more than he could say. Anna would not understand the nature of his concern, and beyond that … he might have mentioned it to Roy during one of their phone calls, back in the old days. But Roy had no time and was obsessed, and there was no one else with whom to share the feeling that Joe had changed and was not himself. That wasn’t something you could say.

Sometimes he brought it up with Anna obliquely, as a question, and she agreed that Joe was different than he had been before his fever, but she seemed to regard it as within the normal range of childhood changes, and mostly a function of learning to talk. Growing up. Her theory was that as Joe learned to talk he got less and less frustrated, that his earlier tempestuousness had been frustration at not being able to communicate what he was thinking.

But this theory presupposed that the earlier Joe had been inarticulate, and in possession of thoughts he had wanted to communicate to the world but couldn’t; and that did not match Charlie’s experience. In his opinion, Joe had always communicated exactly whatever he was feeling or thinking. Even before he had had language, his thoughts had still been perfectly explicit, though not linguistic. They had been precise feelings, and Joe had expressed them precisely, and with well-nigh operatic virtuosity.

In any case, now it was different. To Charlie, radically different. Anna didn’t see that, and it would upset her if Charlie could persuade her to see it, so he did not try. He wasn’t even sure what it was he would be trying to convey. He didn’t really believe that the real Joe had gone away as a result of the Khembalis’ ceremony for him. When Charlie had made the request, his rather vague notion had been that what such a ceremony would dispel would be the Khembalis’ interest in Joe, and their belief that he harbored the spirit of one of their reincarnated lamas. Altering the Khembalis’ attitude toward Joe would then change Joe himself, but in minor ways – ways that Charlie now found he had not fully imagined, for how exactly had he thought that Joe was ‘not himself,’ beyond being feverish, and maybe a bit subdued, a bit cautious and fearful? Had that really been the result of the Khembalis’ regard? And if their regard were to change, why exactly would Joe go back to the way he was before – feisty, bold, full of himself?

Perhaps he wouldn’t. It had not worked out that way, and now Charlie’s ideas seemed flawed to him. Now he had to try to figure out just exactly what it was he had wanted, what he thought had happened in the ceremony, and what he thought was happening now.

It was a hard thing to get at, made harder by the intensity of his new schedule. He only saw Joe for a couple of hours a day, during their commutes, and their time in the Metro cars was confined, with both of them asleep on many a morning’s ride in, and both of them tired and distracted by the day’s events on the way home. Charlie would sit Joe beside him, or on his lap, and they would talk, and Joe was pretty similar to his old self, babbling away at things outside the window or in his stroller, or referring to events earlier in his day, telling semi-coherent stories. It was hard to be sure what he was talking about most of the time, although toys and teachers and the other kids were clear enough, and formed the basis of most of his conversation.

But then they would walk home and enter the house, and life with Anna and Nick, and often that was the last they would have to do with each other until bedtime. So – who knew? It was not like the old days, with the vast stretches of the day, the week, the season, extending before and behind them in a perpetual association not unlike the lives of Siamese twins. Charlie now saw only fragmentary evidence. It was hard to be sure of anything.

Nevertheless. He saw what he saw. Joe was not the same. And so, trapped at the back of his mind (but always there) was the fear that he had somehow misunderstood and asked for the wrong thing for his son – and gotten it.

As the winter deepened it became more and more expensive to warm the entire house. The price of heating oil became a political issue, but President Chase tried to keep the focus on the alternative sources they needed to develop. At the Quiblers’, Anna programmed the house’s thermostat to choreograph their evenings, so that they congregated in the kitchen and living room in the early evenings, and then bumped the heat upstairs in the hour before bedtime to augment whatever heat had gathered there from below. It worked fairly well, following and reinforcing what they would have done anyway. But one exceptionally cold night in early February the power went out, and everything was suddenly different.

Anna had a supply of flashlights and candles in a cabinet in the dining room, and quickly she banged her way to them and got some candles lit in every room. She turned on a battery-powered radio, and Nick twiddled the dial trying to find some news. While Charlie was building up the fire in the fireplace, they listened to a crackly distant voice that said a cold front like one from the winter before had dropped temperatures across New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey by up to sixty degrees in twenty minutes, presumably causing a surge in demand or a malfunction at some point in the grid, thus crashing the system.

‘I’m glad we all got home in time,’ Anna said. ‘We could have been in the Metro somewhere.’

They could hear sirens beginning to oscillate through the air of the city. The Metro had an emergency generating system, Charlie thought, but no doubt the streets were clotted with cars, as they could see was true out on Wisconsin, just visible from their front window. When Charlie stepped outside to get more firewood from their screened-in porch, he smelled the smell of a power outage, unexpectedly familiar from the winter before: exhaust of burned generator fuel, smoke of green firewood.

Inside the boys were clamoring for marshmallows. Anna had unearthed a bag of them at the back of a kitchen cabinet. Anna passed on trying one, to Joe’s amazement, and went to the kitchen to whip up a late salad, keeping the refrigerator door open for as short a time as possible, wondering as she did so how quickly an unopened refrigerator would lose its chill. She resolved to buy a couple of thermometers to find out. The information might come in useful.

Back in the living room, Charlie had finished lighting all the candles in the house, a profligacy that created a fine glow, especially when they were set around the room where the shadows from the fire congregated the most. Carrying one upstairs, Anna watched the shadows shift and flicker with her steps, and wondered if they would be warm enough up there that night; the bedrooms felt colder than the inside of the refrigerator had. She wondered briefly if a refrigerator would work to keep things from freezing in a sub-zero house.

‘We should maybe sleep on the couches down here,’ she said when she was back in the living room. ‘Do we have enough firewood to keep a fire going all night?’

‘I think so,’ Charlie said. ‘If the wood will burn.’

Last winter after the cold snap, there had been a period when firewood had been deemed cheaper heat than oil or gas, and all the cured firewood had been quickly bought and burned. This year green wood was almost all that was available, and it burned very poorly, as Charlie was now finding out. He threw in a paraffin-and-sawdust log from time to time, and used his massive wrought-iron fire tongs to lift the heavy recalcitrant logs over the fake ones to dry them out and keep things going.

‘Remind me to buy dry wood next time.’

Anna took her bowl back into the kitchen. Water was still running, but it wouldn’t for long. She filled her pots, and a couple of five gallon plastic jugs they had in the basement. These too would freeze eventually, unless she put them near the fire. They needed a better black-out routine, she saw. She took them out to the living room and saw the boys settling in. This must be how it had been, she thought, for generations on end; everyone huddling together at night for warmth. Probably she would have to work from home the next day, though her laptop battery was depleted. She wished laptop batteries lasted longer.

‘Remind me to check the freezer in the morning. I want to see if things have started to thaw.’

‘If you open it, it will lose its cool.’

‘Unless the kitchen is colder than the freezer. I’ve been wondering about that.’

‘Maybe we should just leave the freezer door open then.’

‘Maybe we can get the fire going in it!’

They laughed at this, but Anna still felt uneasy.

They built a city on the coffee table using Joe’s blocks, then read by candlelight. Charlie and Nick hauled an old double mattress that they called the Tigers’ Bed up from the basement, and they laid it right before the fire, where Joe used it as a trampoline which looked like it was going to slingshot him right into the feeble blaze.

When everything was arranged, Charlie read aloud some pages from The Once and Future King, about what it was like to be a goose migrating over the Norwegian Sea – a passage that had Anna and the boys entranced. Finally they put out the candles, and fell asleep –

Only to awaken all together, surprised and disoriented, when the power came back on. It was 2 AM, and beyond the reach of the smoldering gray coals the house was very cold, but fully lit, and buzzing with the sounds of its various machines. Anna and Charlie got up to turn the lights off. The boys were already asleep again by the time they got back downstairs.

The next day, things were back to normal, more or less, though the air was still smoky. Everyone wanted to tell stories about where they had been when the power went off, and what had happened to them.

‘It was actually kind of nice,’ Charlie said the next night at dinner. ‘A little adventure.’

Anna had to agree, though she was still uneasy. ‘It wouldn’t have been if the power were still off.’

THREE Going Feral

Again foul weather shall not change my mind, But in the shade I will believe what in the sun I loved.

—Thoreau

Against the pressure at the front of one’s thoughts must be held the power of cognition, as a shield. Cognition that could see its own weak points, and attempt to work around them.

Examination of the relevant literature, however, revealed that there were cognitive illusions that were as strong or even stronger than optical illusions. This was an instructive analogy, because there were optical illusions in which one’s sight was fooled no matter how fully one understood the illusion and its effect, and tried to compensate for it. Spin a disk with certain black and white patterns on it, and colors appear undeniably to the eye. Stand at the bottom of a cliff and it will appear to be about a thousand feet tall, no matter its real height; mountaineers called this foreshortening, and Frank knew it could not be avoided. From the bottom of El Capitan, one looked up three thousand feet, and it looked like about a thousand. In Klein Scheidegg one looked up the north face of the Eiger, and it looked about a thousand feet tall. You could not alter that even by focusing on the strangely compact details of the face’s upper surface. In Thun, twenty miles away, you could look south across the Thunersee and see that the north face of the Eiger was a stupendous face, six thousand feet tall and looking every inch of it. But if you returned to Klein Scheidegg, so would the foreshortening. You could not make the adjustment.

There were many cognitive errors just like those optical errors. The human mind had grown on the savannah, and there were kinds of thinking not natural to it. Calculating probabilities, thinking about statistical effects; the cognitive scientists had cooked up any number of logic problems, and tested great numbers of subjects with them, and even working with statisticians as their subjects they could find the huge majority prone to some fairly basic cognitive errors, which they had given names like anchoring, ease of representation, the law of small number, the fallacy of near certainty, asymmetric similarity, trust in analogy, neglect of base rates, and so on.

One test that had caught even Frank, despite his vigilance, was the three-box game. Three boxes, all closed, one ten-dollar bill hidden in one of them; the experimenter knows which. Subject chooses one box, at that point left closed. Experimenter opens one of the other two boxes, always an empty one. Subject then offered a chance to either stick with his first choice, or switch to the other closed box. Which should he do?

Frank had decided it didn’t matter; fifty-fifty either way. He thought it through.

But each box at the start had a one-third chance of being the one. When subject chooses one, the other two have two-thirds of a chance of being right. After experimenter opens one of those two boxes, always empty, those two boxes still have two-thirds of a chance, now concentrated in the remaining unchosen box, while the subject’s original choice still had its original one-third chance. So one should always change one’s choice!

Shit. Well, put it that way, it was undeniable. Though it still seemed wrong. But this was the point. Human cognition had all kinds of blind spots. One analyst of the studies had concluded by saying that we simulate in our actions what we wish had already happened. We act, in short, by projecting our desires.

Well – but of course. Wasn’t that the point?

But clearly it could lead to error. The question was, could one’s desires be defined in such a way as to suggest actions that were truly going to help make them come to pass in one of those futures still truly possible, given the conditions of the present?

And could that be done if there was a numb spot behind one’s nose – a pressure on one’s thoughts – a suspension of one’s ability to decide anything?

And could these cognitive errors exist for society as a whole, as well as for an individual? Some spoke of ‘cognitive mapping’ when they discussed taking social action – a concept that had been transferred from geography to politics, and even to epistemology, as far as Frank could tell. One mapped the unimaginable immensity of postmodern civilization (or, reality) not by knowing all of it, which was impossible, but by marking routes through it. So that one was not like the GPS or the radar system, but rather the traffic controller, or the pilot.

At that point it became clear even mapping was an analogy. Anna would not think much of it. But everyone needed a set of operating procedures to navigate the day. A totalizing theory forming the justification for a rubric for the daily decisions. The science of that particular Wednesday. Using flawed equipment (the brain, civilization) to optimize results. Most adaptive practices. Robustness.

Something from ecology, from Aldo Leopold: What’s good is what’s good for the land.

Something from Rudra (although he said from the Dalai Lama, or the Buddha): Try to do good for other people. Your happiness lies there.

Try it and see. Make the experiment and analyze it. Try again. Act on your desires.

So what do you really want?

And can you really decide?

One day when Frank woke up in the garden shed with Rudra, it took him a while to remember where he was – long enough that when he sat up he was actively relieved to be Frank Vanderwal, or anybody.

Then he had trouble figuring out which pants to put on, something he had never considered before in his life; and then he realized he did not want to go to work, although he had to. Was this unusual? He wasn’t sure.

As he munched on a power bar and waited for his bedside coffee machine to provide, he clicked on his laptop, and after the portentous chord announced the beginning of his cyber-day, he went to emersonfortheday.net.

‘Hey, Rudra, are you awake?’

‘Always.’

‘Listen to this. It’s Emerson, talking about our parcellated mind theory:

“It is the largest part of a man that is not inventoried. He has many enumerable parts: he is social, professional, political, sectarian, literary, and is this or that set and corporation. But after the most exhausting census has been made, there remains as much more which no tongue can tell. And this remainder is that which interests. Far the best part of every mind is not that which he knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing, unpossessed, before him. This dancing chorus of thoughts and hopes is the quarry of his future, is his possibility.”’

‘Maybe so,’ Rudra said. ‘But whole sight is good too. Being one.’

‘But isn’t it interesting he talks about it in the same terms.’

‘It is common knowledge. Anyone knows that.’

‘I guess. I think Emerson knows a lot of things I don’t know.’

He was a man who had spent time in the forest, too. Frank liked to see the signs of this: ‘The man who rambles in the woods seems to be the first man that ever entered a grove, his sensations and his world are so novel and strange.’ That was right; Frank knew that feeling. Hikes in the winter forest, so surreal – Emerson knew about them. He had seen the woods at twilight. ‘Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon; incredibly excellent topaz and ruby at four o’clock; cold and shabby at six.’ The quick strangeness of the world, how it came on you all of a sudden – now, for Frank, the feeling started on waking in the morning. Coming up blank, the primal man, the first man ever to wake. Strange indeed, not to know who or what you were.

Often these days he felt he should be moving back out into the park, and living in his treehouse. That would mean leaving the Khembalis, however, and that was bad. But on the other hand, it would in some ways be a relief. He had been living with them for almost a year now, hard to believe but it was true, and they were so crowded. They could use all the extra space they could get. Besides, it felt like time to get back outdoors and into the wind again. Spring was coming, spring and all.

But there was Rudra to consider. As his roommate, Frank was part of his care. He was old, frail, sleeping a lot. Frank was his companion and his friend, his English teacher and his Tibetan student. Moving out would inevitably disrupt that situation.

He read on for a while, then realized he was hungry, and that in poking around and thinking about Emerson and Thoreau, and cognitive blind spots, he had been reading for over an hour. Rudra had gotten up and slipped out. ‘Aack!’ Time to get up! Seize the day!

Up and out then. Another day. He had to consult with Edgardo about the Caroline situation. Best get something to eat first. But – from where?

He couldn’t decide.

A minute or two later, angrily, and before even actually getting up, he grabbed his cell phone and made the call. He called his doctor’s office, and found that, regarding a question like this, the doctor couldn’t see him for a week.

That was fine with Frank. He had made the decision and made the call. Caroline would have no reason to reproach him, and he could go back to the way things were. Not that something didn’t have to be done. It was getting ridiculous. It was a – an obstacle. A disability. An injury, not just to his brain, but to his thinking.

That very afternoon, the urgency in him about Caroline being so sharp and recurrent, he made arrangements to go out on a run with Edgardo. It was an afternoon so cold that no one but Kenzo would have gone out with them, and he was away at a conference, so after they cleared themselves with the wands (which Frank now questioned as fully reliable indicators), off they went.

The two of them ran side by side through the streets of Arlington, bundled up in nearly Arctic running gear, their heavy wool caps rolled up just far enough to expose their ears’ bottom halves, which allowed sound into the eardrums so they could hear each other over the noise of traffic without shouting or completely freezing their ears. Very soon they would be moving with Diane over to the Old Executive Offices, right next door to the White House; this would be one of their last runs on this route. But it was such a lame route that neither would miss it.

Frank explained what had happened in Maine, in short rhythmic phrases synchronized with his stride. It was such a relief to be able to tell somebody about it. Almost a physical relief. One vented, as they said.

‘So how the heck did they follow me?’ he demanded at the end of his tale. ‘I thought your friend said I was clean.’

‘He thought you were,’ Edgardo said. ‘And it isn’t certain you were followed. It could have been a coincidence.’

Frank shook his head.

‘Well, there may be other ways you are chipped, or they may indeed have just followed you physically. We’ll work on that, but the question now becomes what has she done.’

‘She said she has a Plan C that no one can trace. And she said it would get her down in this area. That she’d get in touch with me. I don’t know how that will work. Anyway now I’m wondering if we can, you know, root these guys out. Maybe sic the president on them.’

‘Well,’ Edgardo said, elongating the word for about a hundred yards. ‘These kinds of black operations are designed to be insulated, you know. To keep those above from responsibility for them.’

‘But surely if there was a problem, if you really tried to hunt things down from above? Following the money trail, for instance?’

‘Maybe. Black budgets are everywhere. Have you asked Charlie?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe you should, if you feel comfortable doing that. Phil Chase has a million things on his plate. It might take someone like Charlie to get his attention.’

Frank nodded. ‘Well, whatever happens, we need to stop those guys.’

‘We?’

‘I mean, they need to be stopped. And no one else is doing it. And, I don’t know – maybe you and your friends from your DARPA days, or wherever, might be able to make a start. You’ve already made the start, I mean, and could carry it forward from there.’

‘Well,’ Edgardo said. ‘I shouldn’t speak to that.’

Frank focused on the run. They were down to the river path now, and he could see the Potomac was frozen over again, looking like a discolored white sheet that had been pulled over the river’s surface and then tacked down roughly at the banks. The sight reminded him of Long Pond, and the shock of seeing those men striding across the ice toward them; his pulse jumped, but his hands and feet got colder. The tip of his nose, still a bit numb at the best of times, was even number than usual. He squeezed and tugged it to get some feeling and blood flow.

‘Nose still numb?’

‘Yes.’

Edgardo broke into the song ‘Comfortably Numb’: ‘I – – I, have become, comfortably numb,’ then scat singing the famous guitar solo, ‘Da daaaa, da da da da da-da-daaaaaa,’ exaggerating Gilmour’s bent notes. ‘Okay! Okay, okay, Is there anybody in there?’ Abruptly he broke off. ‘Well, I will go talk to my friend whom you met. He’s into this stuff and he has an interest. His group is still looking at the election problem, for sure.’

‘Do you think I could meet him again? To explore some strategies?’ And ask a bunch of questions, he didn’t say.

‘Maybe. Let me talk to him. It may be pointless to meet. It depends. I’ll check. Meanwhile you should try your other options.’

‘I don’t know that I have any.’

‘Are you still having trouble making decisions?’

‘Yes.’

‘Go see your doctor, then.’

‘I did! I mean, I’ve got an appointment. The time has almost come.’

Edgardo laughed.

‘Please,’ Frank said. ‘I’m trying. I made the call.’

But in fact, when the time came for his doctor’s appointment, he went in unhappily. Surely, he thought obstinately, deciding to go to the doctor meant he was well enough to decide things!

So he felt ridiculous as he described the problem to the doctor, a young guy who was looking rather dubious. Frank felt his account was sketchy at best, as he very seldom tasted blood at the back of his throat anymore. But he could not complain merely of feeling indecisive, so he emphasized the tasting a little more than the most recent data would truly support, which made him feel even more foolish. He hated visiting the doctor at any time, so why was he there just to exaggerate an occasional symptom? Maybe his decision-making capability was damaged after all! Which meant it was good to have come in. And yet here he was making things up. Although he was only trying to physicalize the problem, he told himself. To describe real symptoms.

In any case, the doctor offered no opinion, but only gave him a referral to an ear nose and throat guy. It was the same one Frank had seen immediately after his accident. Frank steeled himself, called again (two decisions?) and found that here the next appointment available was a month away. Happily he wrote down the date and forgot about it.

Or would have; except now he was cast back into the daily reality of struggling to figure out what to do. Hoping every morning that Emerson or Thoreau would tell him. So he didn’t really forget about the appointment, but it was scheduled and he didn’t have to go for a long time, so he could be happy. Happy until the next faint taste of old blood slid down the back of his throat, like the bitterness of fear itself, and he would check and see the day was getting nearer with a mix of relief and dread.

Once he noticed the date when talking with Anna, because she said something about not making it through the winter in terms of several necessary commodities that people had taken to hoarding. She had gotten into studying hoarding in the social science literature. Hoarding, Anna said, represented a breakdown in the social contract which even their economy’s capacity for over-production in many items could not compensate for.

‘It’s another case of prisoner’s dilemma,’ Frank said. ‘Everyone’s choosing the “always defect” option as being the safest. Or the one in which you rely least on others.’

‘Maybe.’

Anna was not one for analogies. She was as literal-minded a person as Frank had ever met; it was always good to remember that she had started her scientific training as a chemist. Metaphors bounced off her like spears off bulletproof glass. If she wanted to understand hoarding, then she googled ‘hoarding,’ and when she saw links to mathematical studies of the economics and social dynamics of ‘hoarding in shortage societies,’ those were the ones she clicked on, even if they tended to be old work from the socialist and post-socialist literature. Those studies had had a lot of data to work with, sadly, and she found their modeling interesting, and spoke to Frank of things like choice rubrics in variable information states, which she thought he might be able to formalize as algorithms.

‘It’s called “always defect,”’ Frank insisted.

‘Okay, but then look at what that leads to.’

‘All right.’

Clearly Anna was incensed at how unreasonable people were being. To her it was a matter of being rational, of being logical. ‘Why don’t they just do the math?’ she demanded.

A rhetorical question, Frank judged. Though he wished he could answer it, rhetorically or not, in a way that did not depress him. His investigations into cognition studies were not exactly encouraging. Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape.

After this conversation, Frank recalled her saying ‘end of the winter’ as if that were near, and he checked his desk calendar – the date circled for his ENT appointment was circled there, and not too far away – and suddenly he realized that in America, when it came to health care, the most important product of them all, they always operated in a shortage society.

In any case, he went to the doctor when the day came. Ear nose and throat – but what about brain? He read Walden in the waiting room, was ushered into an examination room to wait and read some more, then five minutes of questions and inspections, and the diagnosis was made: he needed to see another specialist. A neurologist, in fact, who would have to take a look at some scans, possibly CT, PET, SPECT, MRI; the brain guy would make the calls. The ENT guy would give him a referral, he said, and Frank would have to see where they could fit him in. Scans; the reading and analysis of the brain guy; then perhaps a re-examination by the ENT. How long would it all take? Try it and see. They hurried things up in scheduling when there were questions about the brain, but only so much could be done; there were a lot of other people out there with equally serious problems, or worse ones.

So, Frank thought as he went back to work in his office. You could buy DVD players for thirty dollars and flat-screen TVs for a hundred, also a million other consumer items that would help you to experience vicariously the lives that your work and wages did not give you to live (that T-shirt seen on Connecticut Avenue, ‘Medieval Peasants Worked Less Than You Do’) – everything was cheap, in overproduction – except you lived in a permanent shortage of doctors, artificially maintained. Despite the high cost of medical insurance (if you could get it) you had to wait weeks or months on tests to find out how your bodies were sick or injured, when such events befell you. Even though it was possible to measure statistically how much health care a given population was going to need, and provide it accordingly.

But there was nothing for it but to think about other things, when he could; and when not, to bide his time and try to work, like everyone else.

It had been every kind of winter so far, warmer, drier, stormier, colder. Bad for agriculture, but good for conversation. In the first week of March, a cold front swept south and knocked them back into full winter lockdown, the river frozen, the city frozen, every Metro vent steaming frost, which then froze and fell to the ground as white dust. The whole city was frosted, and with all the steam curling out of the ground, looked as if it had been built atop a giant hot springs. When the sun came out everything glittered whitely, then prismatically when the melting began, then went gray when low stratus clouds obscured the sun.

For Frank this was another ascent into what he thought of as high latitude or high altitude: a return to the high country one way or another, because weather was landscape, in that however the land lay underfoot, it was the weather that gave you a sense of where you were.

If it was below zero, then you were in the arctic. You found yourself on the cold hill’s side, in a dreamscape as profound as any imaginable. One recalled in the body itself that the million-year ballooning of the brain, the final expansion with its burst into language and art and culture, had occurred in the depths of an ice age, when it had been like this all the time. No wonder the mind lit up like a fuse in such air!

And so Frank got out his snowshoes and gaiters and ski poles, and drove over to Rock Creek Park and went out for hikes, just as he had the winter before. And though this year there was not that sense of discovery in the activity, it was certainly just as cold, or almost. Wind barreling down the great ravine from the north, the icy new rip in the canyon looking from its rim just as blasted by the great flood as the day the waters had receded.

The park was emptier this year, however. Or maybe it was just that there was no one at site 21. But many of the other sites were empty as well. Maybe it was just that during weeks this cold, people simply found shelter. That had happened the previous winter as well. In theory one could sleep out in temperatures like this, if one had the right gear and the right expertise, but it would have taken a great deal of time and energy to accomplish, and would still have been somewhat dangerous; it would have to become one’s main activity. And no doubt some people were doing it; but most had found refuge in the coffee shops by day and the shelters and feral houses by night, waiting out the coldest part of the winter indoors. As Frank had done, when he had been taken in by the Khembalis.

Leaving, in these most frigid days, the animals. He saw the aurochs once; and a Canada lynx (I call it the Concord lynx, Thoreau said), as still as a statue of itself; and four or five foxes in their winter white. And a moose, a porcupine, coyote, and scads of white-tailed deer; also rabbits. These last two were the obvious food species for what predators there were. Most of the exotic ferals were gone, either recaptured or dead. Although once he spotted what he thought was a snow leopard; and people said the jaguar was still at large.

As were the frisbee guys. One Saturday Frank heard them before he saw them – hoots over a rise to the north – Spencer’s distinctive yowl, which meant a long putt had gone in. Cheered by the sound, Frank poled around the point in the ravine wall, snowshoes sinking deep in the drifts there, and suddenly there they were, running on little plastic snowshoes, without poles, and throwing red, pink and orange frisbees, which blazed through the air like beacons from another universe.

‘Hi guys!’ Frank called.

‘Frank!’ they cried. ‘Come on!’

‘You bet,’ Frank said. He left his poles and daypack under a tree at site 18, and borrowed one of Robert’s disks.

Off they went. Quickly it became clear to Frank that when the snow was as hard as it was, running on snowshoes was about as efficient as walking on them. One tended to leap out of each step before the snowshoe had sunk all the way in, thus floating a bit higher than otherwise.

Then he threw a drive straight into a tree trunk, and broke the disk in half. Robert just laughed, and Spencer tossed him a spare. The guys did not over-value any individual disk. They were like golf balls, made to be lost.

Work as hard as they did, and you would sweat – just barely – after which, when you stopped, sweat would chill you. As soon as they were done, therefore, Frank found out when they thought they would play snow golf again, then bid farewell and hustled away, back to his daypack and poles. A steady hike then, to warm back up: plunging poles in to pull him uphill, to brace him downhill; little glissades, tricky traverses, yeoman ups; quickly he was warm again and feeling strong and somehow full, the joy of the frisbee buzzing through the rest of the afternoon. The joy of the hunt and the run and the cold.

He walked by his tree, looked up at it longingly. He wanted to move back out there. But he wanted to stay with Rudra too. And Caroline’s ex might be keeping watch out here. The thought made him stop and look around. No one in sight. He would have to wand his tree to see if there was anything there. The floorboards of the treehouse were visible, at least if you knew where to look, and of course Frank did, so it was hard for him to judge how obvious they were to others. Wherever he went in the park, if his tree was in sight, he could see various bits of the little black triangle that was his true home.

The following Monday he made sure to arrange a run with Edgardo again. The need to speak securely was going to drive them to new levels of fitness.

As they trailed Kenzo and Bob down the narrow path next to Route 66, he said, ‘So did you ever hear anything back from your friend?’

‘Yes. A little. I was going to tell you.’

‘What?’

‘He said, the problem with taking the top-down approach is the operation might be legal, and also legally secret, such that even the President might have trouble finding out about it.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No. He said that most presidents want it that way, so they aren’t breaking the law by knowing, if the operation chooses to do something illegal for the higher good. So, Chase might have to order a powerful group right under his command to seek something like this out.’

‘Jesus. Are there any such powerful groups?’

‘Oh sure. He would have his choice of three or four. But this presumes that you could get him that interested in the matter. The thing you have to remember is, a president has a lot on his plate. He has a staff to filter it all and prioritize what gets to him, so there are levels to get through. So, these people we’re interested in know that, and they trust he would never go after something this little.’

‘Something as little as stolen presidential elections?’

‘Well, maybe, but how much would he want to know about that, when he just won?’

They paced on while Frank tried to digest this.

‘So did your friend have any other ideas?’

‘Yes. He said, it might be possible to get these people embroiled in some kind of trouble with an agency that is less black than they are. Some kind of turf battle or the like.’

‘Ahhh …’

Quickly Frank began to see possibilities. While at NSF, Diane had been fighting other agencies all over the place, usually David-and-Goliath type actions, as most of NSF’s natural rivals in the federal bureaucracy were far bigger than it. And size mattered in the Feds, as elsewhere, because it meant money. This little gang of security thugs Frank had tangled with were surely treading on some other more legitimate agency’s turf. Possibly they had even started in some agency and gone rambo without the knowledge of their superiors.

‘That’s a good idea. Did he have any specific suggestions?’

‘He did, and he was going to work up some more. It turns out he has reasons to dislike these guys beyond the destruction-of-democracy stuff.’

‘Oh good.’

‘Yes. It is best never to rely on people standing on principle.’

‘So true,’ Frank said grimly.

This set off Edgardo’s raucous laugh and his little running prance of cynical delight. ‘Ah yes, you are learning! You are beginning to see! My friend said he will give me a menu of options soon.’

‘I hope it’s real soon. Because my friend’s out there enacting her Plan C, and I’m worried. I mean, she’s a data analyst, when you get right down to it. She isn’t any kind of field spook. What if her Plan C is as bad as her Plan B was?’

‘That would be bad. But my friend has been looking into that too. I asked him to, and he did, and he said he can’t see any sign of her. She seems to be really off the net this time.’

‘That’s good. But her ex might know more than your friend. And she said she’d be around here somewhere.’

‘Yes. Well, I’ll go see my friend as soon as I can. I have to follow our protocol though, unless it’s an emergency. We only usually talk once a week.’

‘I understand,’ Frank said, then wondered if he did.

With Chase now in office the new administration’s activity level was manic but focused. Among many more noted relocations, Diane and all the rest of the science advisor’s team moved into their new offices in the Old Executive Building, just to the west of the White House and within the White House security barrier.

So Frank gave up his office at NSF, which had served as the living room and office in his parcellated house. As he moved out he felt a bit stunned, even dismayed. He had to admit that the set of habits that had been that modular house was now completely demolished. He followed Diane to their new building, wondering if he had made the right decision to go with her. Of course his real home now was the Khembali embassy’s garden shed. He was not really homeless. Maybe it was a bad thing not to have rented a place somewhere. If he had kept looking he could have found something.

Then Diane convened a week’s worth of meetings with all the agencies and departments she wanted to deal with frequently, and during that week he saw that being inside the White House compound was a good thing, and that he needed to be there for Diane. She needed the help; there were literally scores of agencies that had to be gathered into the effort they had in mind, and many of them had upper managements appointed during the years of executive opposition to climate mitigation. Even after the long winter, not all of them were convinced they needed to change. ‘They’re being actively passive-aggressive,’ Diane said with a wry grin. ‘War of the agencies, big time.’

‘Such trivial crap they’re freaking about,’ Frank complained. He was amazed it didn’t bother her more. ‘EPA trying to keep USGS interpreting pesticide levels they’re finding, because interpretation is EPA’s job? Energy and Navy fighting over who gets to do new nuclear? It’s always turf battles.’

She waved them all away with a hand, seemingly un-annoyed. ‘Turf battles matter in Washington, I’m sorry to say. We’re going to have to get things done using these people. Chase has to make a lot of appointments fast for us to have any chance of doing that. And we’ll have to be scrupulous in keeping to the boundaries. It’s no time to be changing the bureaucracy too much; we’ve got bigger fish to fry. I plan to try to keep all these folks happy about their power base holding fast, but just get them on board to help the cause.’

It made sense when she put it that way, and after that he understood better her manner with the old guard technocracy they were so often dealing with. She was always conciliatory and unassuming, asking questions, then laying out her ideas more as questions rather than commands, and always confining herself to whatever that particular agency was specifically involved in.

‘Not that that’s what I always do,’ Diane said, when Frank once made this observation to her. She looked ashamed.

‘What do you mean?’ Frank asked quickly.

‘Well, I had a bad meeting with the deputy secretary of Energy, Holderlin. He’s a hold-over, and he was trying to disparage the alternatives program. So I got him fired.’

‘You did?’

‘I guess so. I sent a note over to the president describing the problem I was having, and the next thing I knew he was out.’

‘Do people know that’s how it happened?’

‘I think so.’

‘Well – good!’

She laughed ruefully. ‘I’ve had that thought myself. But it’s a strange feeling.’

‘Get used to it. We probably need a whole bunch of people fired. You’re the one who always calls it the war of the agencies.’

‘Yes, but I never had the power to get people in other agencies fired before.’

To change the subject to something that would make her more comfortable, Frank said, ‘I’m having some luck getting the military interested. They’re the eight-hundred pound gorilla in this zoo. If they were to come down definitively on the side of our efforts, as being a critical aspect of national defense, then these other agencies would either get on board or become irrelevant.’

‘Yes, maybe,’ Diane said. ‘But what they are you talking about? The Joint Chiefs?’

‘Well, to an extent. Although I’ve been starting with people I know, like General Wracke. Also meeting some of the chief scientists. They’re not much in the decision-making loop, but they might be easier to convince about the science. I show them the Marshall Report they did internally, rating climate change as more of a defense threat than terrorism. It seems to help.’

‘Can you make a copy of that for distribution?’

‘Yes. It would also make sense to reach out to all the scientists in government, and ask them to get behind the National Academy statement on the climate for starters, then help us to work on the agencies they’re involved with.’

‘Sure. But they don’t decide, and there’s management who will be against us no matter what their scientists say, because that’s why they were appointed in the first place.’

‘There’s where your firing one of them may have an effect.’ Frank grinned and Diane made a face.

‘Okay, fine,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s time to talk to Energy then. If they’re scared that they’ll lose their funding, that’s the moment to strike.’

‘Which means we should be talking to the OMB?’

‘Yes. We definitely need the OMB on our side. That should be possible, if Chase has appointed the right people to head it.’

‘And then the appropriations committees.’

‘The best chance there is to talk to their staffs, and to win some new seats in the mid-term election. For Chase’s first two years, it’ll be a bit uphill when it comes to Congress.’

‘At least he’s got the Senate.’

‘Yes, but really you need both.’

‘Hm.’

Frank saw it anew: hundreds of parts to the federal government, each part holding a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, jockeying to determine what kind of picture they all made together. War of the agencies, the Hobbesian struggle of all against all – it needed to be changed to some kind of dance. Made coherent. Lased.

In his truncated time off it was hard to get many hours in with Nick any more, as Nick was often busy with other people in FOG, including a youth group, as well as with all his other activities at school and home. They still held to a meeting at the zoo every third Saturday morning, more or less, starting with an hour at the tiger enclosure, taking notes and photos, then doing a cold-certification course, or walking up to the beaver pond to see what they might see. But that time quickly passed, and then Nick was off. Frank missed their longer days out together, but it wasn’t something that he could press about. His friendship with the Quiblers was unusual enough as it was to make him feel awkward, and he didn’t want them wondering if he had some kind of peculiar thing going on about Nick – really the last thing that would occur to him, although he enjoyed the boy’s company greatly. He was a funny kid.

More likely a suspicion was that Frank might have some kind of a thing for Anna, because there was some truth to it. Although it was not something he would ever express or reveal in any way, it was only just a sort of heightened admiration for a friend, an admiration that included an awareness of the friend’s nice figure and her passionate feelings about things, and most of all, her quick and sharp mind. An awareness of just how smart she was. Indeed, here was the one realm in which Frank felt he must know Anna better than Charlie did – in effect Charlie didn’t know enough to know just how smart Anna was. It was like it had been for Frank when trying to evaluate Chessman as a chess player. Once while waiting for Nick to get ready, Frank had posed the three-box problem to Anna, and she had repeated his scenario carefully, and squinted, and then said ‘I guess you’d want to change to that other box, then?’ and he had laughed and put out his hands and bowed like the kids on Saturday Night Live. And this was just the smallest kind of indicator of her quickness – of a quality of thought Frank would have to characterize as boldly methodical.

Charlie only grinned at the exchange and said, ‘She does that kind of thing all the time.’ He would never see the style of her thought well enough to know how to admire it. Indeed what he called her quibbling was often his own inability to see a thrust right to the heart of a problem he had not noticed. She had married a man who was blind in exactly the area she was most dashing.

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