"Fifty Degrees Below" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

III. BACK TO KHEMBAUNG

One Saturday Charlie was out on his own, Joe at home with Anna, Nick out with Frank tracking animals. After running some errands he browsed for a bit in Second Story Books, and he was replacing a volume on its shelf when a woman approached him and said, “Excuse me, can you tell me where I can find William Blake?”

Surprised to be taken for an employee (they were all twenty-five and wore black), Charlie stared blankly at her.

“He’s a poet,” the woman explained.

Now Charlie was shocked; not only taken for a Second Story clerk, but for the kind who did not know who William Blake was?

“Poetry’s back there,” he finally got out, gesturing weakly toward the rear of the store.

The woman slipped past him, shaking her head.

Fire fire burning bright! Charlie didn’t say.

Don’t forget to check the oversized art books for facsimiles of his engravings! he didn’t exclaim.

In fact he’s a lot better artist than poet I think you’ll find! Most of his poetry is trippy gibberish! He didn’t shout.

His cell phone rang and he snatched it out of his pocket. “William Blake was out of his mind!”

“Hello, Charlie? Charlie is that you?”

“Oh hi Phil. Listen, do I look to you like a person who doesn’t know who William Blake was?”

“I don’t know, do you?”

“Shit. You know, great arias are lost to the world because we do not speak our minds. Most of our best lines we never say.”

“I don’t have that problem.”

“No, I guess you don’t. So what’s up?”

“I’m following up on our conversation at the Lincoln Memorial.”

“Oh yeah, good! Are you going to go for it?”

“I think I will, yeah.”

“Great! You’ve checked with your money people?”

“Yes, that looks like it will be okay. There are an awful lot of people who want a change.”

“That’s for sure. But, you know… do you really think you can win?”

“Yes, I think so. The feedback I’ve been getting has been positive. But…”

“But what?”

Phil sighed. “I’m worried about what effect it might have on me. I mean—power corrupts, right?”

“Yes, but you’re already powerful.”

“So it’s already happened, yes, thank you for that. But it’s supposed to get worse, right? Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Was it William Blake who said that?”

“That was Lord Acton.”

“Oh yeah. But he left out the corollary. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and a little bit of power corrupts a little bit.”

“I suppose that must be so.”

“And everyone has a little bit of power.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“So we’re all a little bit corrupt.”

“Hmm—”

“Come on, how does that not parse? It does parse. Power corrupts, and we all have power, so we’re all corrupt. A perfect syllogism, if I’m not mistaken. And in fact the only people we think of as not being corrupt are usually powerless. Prisoners of conscience, the feeble-minded, some of the elderly, saints, children —”

“My children have power.”

“Yes, but are they perfectly pure and innocent?”

Charlie thought of Joe, faking huge distress when Anna came home from work. “No, they’re a little corrupt.”

“Well there you go.”

“I guess you’re right. And saints have power but aren’t corrupt, which is why we call them saints. But where does that leave us? That in this world of universal corruption, you might as well be president?”

“Yes. That’s what I was thinking.”

“So then its okay.”

“Yes. But the sad part is that the corruption doesn’t just happen to the people with power. It spreads from them. They spread it around. I know this is true because I see it. Every day people come to me because I’ve got some power, and I watch them debase themselves or go silly in some way. I see them go corrupt right before my eyes. It’s depressing. It’s like having the Midas touch in reverse, where everything you touch turns to shit.”

“The solution is to become saintlike. Do like Lincoln. He had power, but he kept his integrity.”

“Lincoln could see how limited his power was. Events were out of his control.”

“That’s true for us too.”

“Right. Good thought. I’ll try not to worry. But, you know. I’m going to need you guys. I’ll need friends who will tell me the truth.”

“We’ll be there. We’ll call you on everything.”

“Good. I appreciate that. Because it’s kind of a bizarre thing to be contemplating.”

“I’m sure it is. But you might as well go for it. In for a penny in for a pound. And we need you.”

“You’ll help me with the environmental issues?”

“As always. I mean, I’ve got to take care of Joe, as you know. But I can always talk on the phone. I’m on call any time—oh for God’s sake here she comes again. Look Phil, I’d better get out of here before that lady comes to tell me that Abraham Lincoln was a president.”

“Tell her he was a saint.”

“Make him your patron saint and you’ll be fine bye!”

“That’s bye Mr. President.”

Under surveillance.

After he had come down from the euphoria of seeing Caroline, talking to her, kissing her, planning to meet again—Frank was faced with the unsettling reality of her news. Some group in Homeland Security had him under surveillance.

A creepy thought. Not that he had done anything he needed to hide— except that he had. He had tried to sink a young colleague’s grant proposal, in order to secure that work for a private company he had relations with; and the first part of the plan had worked. Not that that was likely to be what they were surveiling him for—but on the other hand, maybe it was. The connection to Pierzinski was apparently why they were interested in him in the first place. Evidence of what he had tried to do—would there be any in the records? Part of the point of him proceeding had been that nothing in what he had done was in contradiction to NSF panel protocols. However, among other actions he was now reviewing, he had made many calls to Derek Gaspar, CEO of Torrey Pines Generique. In some of these he had perhaps been indiscreet.

Well, nothing to be done about that now. He could only focus on the present, and the future.

Thinking about this in his office, Frank stared at his computer. It was connected to the internet, of course. It had virus protections, firewalls, encryption codes; but for all he knew, there were programs more powerful still, capable of finessing all that and probing directly into his files. At the very least, all his e-mail. And then phone conversations, sure. Credit rating, sure, bank records, all other financial activity—all now data for analysis by participants in some kind of virtual futures market, a market trading in newly emerging ideas, technologies, researchers. All speculated on, as with any other commodity. People as commodities—well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

He went out to a local cyber-café and paid cash to get on one of the house machines. Seating himself before it with a triple espresso, he looked around to see what he could find.

The first sites that came up told the story of the case of the Policy Analysis Market proposal, which had blown up in the face of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, some time before. John Poindexter, of Iran-Contra fame, had set up a futures market in which participants could bet on potential events in the Middle East, including possibilities like terrorist attacks and assassinations. Within a week of announcing the project Poindexter had been forced to resign, and DARPA had cut off all funds not just for the PAM project, but for all research into markets as predictive tools. There were protests about this at the time, from various parties convinced that markets could be powerful predictors, distilling as they did the collective information and wisdom of many people, all putting their money where their mouths were. Different people brought different expertise to the table, it was claimed, and the aggregated information was thought to be better able to predict future performance of the given commodity than any individual or single group could.

This struck Frank as bullshit, but that was neither here nor there. Certainly the market fetishists who dominated their culture would not give up on such an ideologically correct idea just because of a single public relations gaffe. And indeed, Frank quickly came on news of a program called ARDA, Advanced Research and Development Activity, which had become home to both the Total Information Awareness program and the idea futures market. ARDA had been funded as part of the “National Foreign Intelligence Program,” which was part of an intelligence agency that had not been publicly identified. “Evidence Extraction,” “Link Discovery,” “Novel Intelligence from Massive Data”; all kinds of data-mining projects had disappeared with the futures market idea down this particular rabbit hole.

Before it left public view along with the rest of this kind of thing, the idea futures market concept had already been fine-tuned to deal with first iteration problems. “Conditional bidding” allowed participants to nuance their wagers by making them conditional on intermediary events. And—this jumped out at Frank as he read—“market makers” were added to the system, meaning automated bidders that were always available to trade, so that the market would stay liquid even when there were few participants. The first market-maker programs had lost tremendous amounts of money, so their programmers had refined them to a point where they were able to compete successfully with live traders.

Bingo. Frank’s investors.

The whole futures market concept had then gone black, along with ARDA itself. Wherever it was now, it undoubtedly included these programs that could trade in the futures of researchers and their ideas, predicting which would prosper by using the collective pooling of information envisioned in the Total Information Awareness concept, which had dreamed of collating all the information everywhere in the datasphere.

So: virtual markets, with virtual participants, creating virtual results, tracked by real people in real security agencies. All part of the newly secure environment as envisioned in the Homeland Security acts. That these people had chosen a Nazi title for their enterprise was presumably more a tribute to their ignorance and stupidity than to any evil intent. Nevertheless it was not reassuring.

Briefly Frank wondered if he could learn enough to do some reverse transcription, and use this system against itself. Google-bombing was one method that had successfully distorted the datasphere, placing information in ways that caused it to radiate out through the system inaccurately. That particular method had been countered by blockers, but other methods remained out there, using the cascading recombinant math that was part of the algorithm family that both Frank and Yann Pierzinski studied. Pierzinski was the young hotshot, blazing out into new territory; but it was Frank who had recognized what his newly powerful algorithm might do in the real world. Now maybe he had identified another potential application. Yann never would; he was one of those mathematicians who just didn’t care about other stuff. There were theorists and there were engineers, and then there were the few who straddled the two realms, identifying the theories that were most likely to bear fruit in real-world accomplishment, and could suggest to engineering types how they might go about implementing things. That was Frank’s ability as he saw it, and now he wondered how one might formulate the problem for a mathematician, and then an engineering team…

Frank almost called Edgardo, as a fellow realm-straddler, to ask him what he knew; because among other factors, Edgardo had come to NSF from DARPA. DARPA was like NSF, in that it staffed itself mostly with visiting scientists, although DARPA stints were usually three to four years rather than one or two. Edgardo, however, had only lasted there a year. He had never said much about why, only once remarking that his attitude had not been appreciated. Certainly his views on this surveillance matter would be extremely interesting—

But of course Frank couldn’t call him. Even his cell phone might be bugged; and Edgardo’s too. Suddenly he recalled that workman in his new office, installing a power strip. Could a power strip include a splitter that would direct all data flowing through it in more than one direction? And a mike and so on?

Probably so. He would have to talk to Edgardo in person, and in a private venue. Running with the lunchtime runners would give him a chance at that; the group often strung out along the paths.

He needed to know more. Already he wished Caroline would call again. He wanted to talk to everyone implicated in this: Yann Pierzinski—meaning Marta too, which would be hard, terrible in fact, but Marta had moved to Atlanta with Yann and they lived together there, so there would be no avoiding her. And then Francesca Taolini, who had arranged for Yann’s hire by a company she consulted for, in the same way Frank had hoped to. Did she suspect that Frank had been after Yann? Did she know how powerful Yann’s algorithm might be?

He googled her. Turned out, among many interesting things, that she was helping to chair a conference at MIT coming soon, on bioinformatics and the environment. Just the kind of event Frank might attend. NSF even had a group going already, he saw, to talk about the new federal institutes.

Meet with her first, then go to Atlanta to meet with Yann—would that make his stock in the virtual market rise, triggering more intense surveillance? An unpleasant thought; he grimaced.

He couldn’t evade most of this surveillance. He had to continue to behave as if it wasn’t happening. Or rather, treat his actions as also being experiments in the sensitivity of the surveillance. Visit Taolini and Pierzinski, sure, and see if that gave his stock a bump. Though he would need detailed information from Caroline to find out anything about that.

He e-mailed the NSF travel office and had them book him flights to Boston and back. A day trip ought to do it.

Some mornings he woke to the sound of rain ticking onto his roof and the leaves. Dawn light, muted and wet; he lay in his sleeping bag watching grays turn silver. His roof extended far beyond the edges of his plywood floor. When he had all the lines and bungee cords right, the clear plastic quivered tautly in the wind, shedding its myriad deltas of water. Looking up at it, Frank lay comfortably, entirely dry except for that ambient damp that came with rain no matter what one did. Same with all camping, really. But mostly dry; and there he was, high in the forest in the rain, in a rainforest canopy, encased in the splashing of a million drips, and the wet whoosh of the wind in the branches, remaining dry and warm watching it all. Yes, he was an arboreal primate, lying on his foam pad half in his sleeping bag, looking through an irregular bead curtain of water falling from the edge of his roof. A silvery green morning.

Often he heard the other arboreal primates, greeting the day. These days they seemed to be sleeping on the steep slope across the creek from him. The first cry of the morning would fill the gorge, low and liquid at first, a strange cross between siren and voice. It never failed to send a shiver down his spine. That was something hardwired. No doubt the hominid brain included a musical capacity that was not the same as its language capacity. These days people tended to use their musical brains only for listening, thus missing the somatic experience of making it. With that gone the full potential of the experience was lost. “Oooooop!” Singing, howling; it all felt so good. “Ooooh-oooooooooooo-da.”

Something else to consider writing about. Music as primate precursor to language. He would add it to his list of possible papers, already scores if not hundreds of titles long. He knew he would never get to them, but they ought to be written.

He had extended his roof to cover the cut in the railing and floor through which he dropped onto his rope ladder, and so he was able to descend to the ground without getting very wet. Onto the forest floor, not yet squishy, out to his van, around D.C. on the Beltway, making the first calls of the day over his headset. Stop in at Optimodal, singing under his breath, “I’m optimodal, today— optimodal, today!” Into the weight room, where, it being six a.m., Diane was working on one of the leg machines. Familiar hellos, a bit of chat about the rain and her morning calls, often to Europe to make use of the time difference. It was turning out to be a very cool summer in Europe, and rainstorms were being welcomed as signs of salvation; but the environmental offices there were full of foreboding.

Shower, change, walk over to NSF with Diane. Amazing how quickly people developed sets of habits. They could not do without them, Frank had concluded. Even his improvised life was full of them. It might be said that now he had an array of habits that he had to choose from, a kind of menu. Up to his office, check phone messages and e-mail, get coffee, start on the messages that needed action, and the making of a daily Things To Do list out of the standing one on the whiteboard. Bit of breakfast when his stomach reminded him it was being neglected.

One of his Things To Do was to attend another of Diane’s meetings late that morning, this one attended by various division heads, including Anna, and some members of the Science Board.

Diane had been busy organizing her own sense of the climate problem, structuring it in the broadest terms possible. First, however, she had some good news to share; the appropriations committees in Congress had streamlined approval of two billion dollars for NSF to engage with climate issues as soon as possible. “They want us to take action, they said, but in a strictly scientific manner.”

Edgardo snorted. “They want a silver bullet. Some kind of technical fix that will make all the problems go away without any suffering on Wall Street.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Diane said. “They’re funding us, and we’ll be making the determinations as to what might work.”

She clicked to the first of her PowerPoint pages. “Okay. Global environmental problem, having to do with habitat degradation and a hundred parts per million rise in atmospheric carbon, resulting in species loss and food insecurity. You can divide it into land, ocean, and atmosphere. On land, we have loss of topsoil, desertification, and in some places, flooding. In the oceans, we have sea-level rise, either slow because of general warming, already happening, or else fast, as a result of the West Antarctic ice sheet detaching. Probability of the Antarctic ice sheet coming off is very hard to calculate. Then also thermohaline circulation, in particular the North Atlantic stall in the great world current. Also fisheries depletion, also coral reef loss. The oceans are more of a source of trouble than we’re used to thinking. In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide buildup of course, very well known, but also methane and other more powerful greenhouse gases.”

She clicked to the next slide. “Let’s start with atmosphere, particularly the carbon dioxide aspect. Now up to 440 parts per million, from 280 before the industrial revolution. Clearly, we need to slow down how much CO₂ we’re putting into the atmosphere, despite the industrialization of China, India, and many other places. Then also, it would be interesting to see if we could remove and sequester from the atmosphere any significant amounts of CO₂ that are already up there. Drawdown studies, these are sometimes called.

“What’s putting carbon into the atmosphere? The bulk of it comes from energy production and cars. We’ve been burning fossil fuels to create electricity and to move us and our stuff around. If we had cleaner technologies to create electricity and to power transport, we would put less carbon in the air. So, we need cleaner cars and cleaner energy production. There’s been a lot of work done on both fronts, with some very exciting possibilities explored, but bottom line, the oil and car industries are very big, and they work together to obstruct research and development of cleaner technologies that might replace them. Partly because of their lobbying here in D.C., research into cleaner technologies is underfunded, even though some of the new methods show real promise. Some are even ready to go, and could make a difference very rapidly, but are still too expensive to compete financially, especially given the initial costs of installing a new infrastructure, whatever it might be.

“So. Given this situation, I think we have to identify the two or three most promising options in each big carbon area, energy and transport, and then immediately support these options in a major way. Pilot projects, maybe competitions with prizes, certainly suggested tax structures and incentives to get private enterprise investing in it.”

“Make carbon credits really expensive,” Frank said.

“Make gas really expensive,” Edgardo said.

“Yes. These are more purely economic or political fixes. We will run into political resistance on those.”

“You’ll run into political resistance on all these fronts.”

“Yes. But we have to work for everything that looks like it will help, political resistance or not. More and more I’m convinced that this will have to be a multidisciplinary effort, in the largest sense. The front is very broad, and we can’t avoid the awkward parts just because they’ve got difficulties. I was just mentioning them.”

She clicked to her next slide. “Cars. It takes about ten years to replace the fleet of cars on the road, so we need to start now if anything is to be done in a relevant time period. Fuel cell cars, electric, hydrogen. Also, there are some things we could do right away with the current models. Increase fuel efficiency, of course. Could be legislated. Also, fuel flexibility. There is a device that could be added to every conventional car that would enable it to burn gas, ethanol, or methanol. Adds only a couple hundred dollars per vehicle. It too could be legislated to be a requirement. This would have a national security aspect, which is to say, if we are unexpectedly cut off from foreign oil supplies, everyone could still burn ethanol in their cars, and we wouldn’t be completely crippled.”

“Ethanol still puts carbon into the atmosphere,” Frank pointed out.

“Yes, but it’s made from biological material that has been drawn down from the atmosphere when the plant material grew. On the plant’s death it was going to rot and enter the atmosphere as carbon anyway. If you burn it and put it in the atmosphere, you can then also draw it back down in the plants that you use for later fuel, so that it becomes a closed-loop system where there is no net gain of carbon in the atmosphere, even though you have lots of transport. Whereas burning oil and coal adds new carbon to the atmosphere, carbon that was very nicely sequestered before we burned it. So ethanol is better, and it’s available right now, and works in current cars. Most of the other technologies for cleaner power are a decade away in terms of research and development. So it’s nice that we have something we can deploy immediately. A bridge technology. Clearly this should happen right now.”

“If it weren’t for the political obstructions.”

“Yes. Maybe this is an issue where we have to try to educate Congress, the administration, and the people. Think about how we might do that. But now, on to cleaner energy production.” Diane clicked slides again. “Here again we already have proven options, in the form of all the renewables, many of them working and ready to be expanded. Wind, geothermal, solar, and so on.

“The one with tremendous potential for growth is of course solar power. The technological difficulties in transferring sunlight to electricity are complicated enough that there are competing designs for improvement, still struggling to show superiority over the other methods. So one thing we can do is to help identify which ones to pursue with a big effort. Photovoltaic research, of course, but also we need to look at these flexible mirror systems, directing light to heatable elements that transform the heat into electricity. Further down the line, there is also the prospect of space solar, gathering the sunlight in space and beaming it down.”

“Wouldn’t that require help from NASA?”

“Yes, NASA should be part of this. A really big booster is a prerequisite for any conceivable space solar, naturally.”

“And what about DOE?”

“Well, perhaps. We have to acknowledge that some federal agencies have been captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate. Clearly the Department of Energy is one of these. They should have been taking the lead on clean energy, but they began as the Atomic Energy Commission, so for a while they would only look at nuclear, and now they are creatures of the oil industry. So they have been obstructions to innovation for many years. Whether that can change now, I don’t know. I suspect the only good that can come from them is some version of clean coal. If coal can be gasified, it’s possible its carbon and methane could be captured and sequestered before burning. That would be good, if they can pull it off. But beyond that, the unfortunate truth is that DOE is more likely to be one of the impediments to our efforts than a help. We will have to do what we can to engage them, and dance around any obstacles they might set up.”

She clicked again. “Now, carbon capture and sequestering. Here, the hope is that ways can be found to draw down some of the CO₂ already in the atmosphere. That could be a big help, obviously. There are proven mechanical means to do this, but the scale of anything we could afford to build is much too small. If anything’s going to work, it almost certainly will have to be biological. The first and most obvious method here is to grow more plants. Reforestation projects are thus helpful in more ways than one, as stabilizing soil, restoring habitat, growing energy, and growing building materials, all while drawing down carbon. Poplars are often cited as very fast growers with a significant drawdown possibility.

“The other biological method suggested would involve some hypothetical engineered biological system taking more carbon out of the atmosphere than it does now. This brings biotech into the game, and it could be a crucial player. It might have the possibility of working fast enough to help us in the short term.”

For a while they discussed the logistics of initiating all the efforts Diane had sketched out so far, and then Anna took over the PowerPoint screen.

She said, “Another carbon sequestration, in effect, would be to not burn oil that we would have using our current practices. Meaning conservation. It could make a huge difference. Since the United States is the only country living at American consumption levels, if we here decided to consume less, it would significantly reduce world consumption levels.”

She clicked to a slide titled carbon values. It consisted of a list of phrases:

Edgardo was shaking his head. “This amishization, as the engineers call it—you know, this voluntary simplicity movement—it is not going to work.

Not only are we fond of our comforts and toys, and lazy too, but there is a fifty-billion-dollar-a-year industry lighting any such change, called advertising.”

Anna said, “Maybe we could hire an advertising firm to design a series of voluntary simplicity ads, to be aired on certain cable channels.”

Edgardo grinned. “Yes, I would enjoy to see that, but there is a ten-trillion-a-year economy that also wants more consumption. It’s like we’re working within the body of a cancerous tumor. It’s hopeless, really. We will simply charge over the cliff like lemmings.”

“Real lemmings don’t actually run off cliffs,” Anna quibbled. “People might change. People change all the time. It just depends on what they want.”

She had been looking into this matter, which she jokingly called macro-bioinformatics: researching, refining, and even inventing various rubrics by which people could evaluate their consumption levels quantitatively, with the idea that if they saw exactly what they were wasting, they would cut back and save money. The best known of these rubrics, as she explained, were the various “ecological footprint” measurements. These had been originally designed for towns and countries, but Anna had worked out methods for households as well, and now she passed around a chart illustrating one method, with a statistical table that illustrated her earlier point that since Americans were the only ones in the world living at American consumption levels, any reduction here would disproportionately shrink the total world footprint.

“The whole thing should be translated into money values at every step,” Edgardo said. “Put it in the best way everyone in this culture can understand, the cost in dollars and cents. Forget the acreage stuff. People don’t know what an acre is anymore, or what you can expect to extract from it.”

“Education, good,” Diane said. “That’s already part of our task as defined. And it will help to get the kids into it.”

Edgardo cackled. “Okay, maybe they will go for it, but also the economists should be trying to invent an honest accounting system that doesn’t keep exteriorizing costs. When you exteriorize costs onto future generations you can make any damn thing profitable, but it isn’t really true. I warn you, this will be one of the hardest things we might try. Economics is incorrigible. They call it the dismal science but actually it’s the happy religion.”

Frank tended to agree with Edgardo’s skepticism about these kinds of social interventions; and his own interests lay elsewhere, in the category Diane had labeled “Mitigation Projects.” Now she took back the PowerPoint from Anna and clicked to a list which included several of the suggestions Frank had made to her earlier:

All good projects, but it was the next slide, remedial action now, that was the most interesting to Frank. One of the obvious places to start here was with the thermohaline circulation stall. Diane had gotten a complete report from Kenzo and his colleagues at NOAA, and her tentative conclusion was that the great world current, though huge, was sensitive in a nonlinear way to small perturbations. Which meant it might respond sensitively to small interventions if they could be directed well.

So, Diane concluded, this had to be investigated. How big a sea surface was critical to downwelling? How precisely could they pinpoint potential down-welling sites? How big a volume of water were they talking about? If they needed to make it saltier in order to force it to start sinking again, how much salt were they talking about? Could they start new downwellings in the north where they used to happen?

Kenzo’s eyes were round. He met Frank’s gaze, waggled his eyebrows like Groucho. Pretty interesting stuff!

“We have to do something,” Diane declared, without glancing at Frank. He thought: she’s been convinced. I was at least part of that. “The Gulf Stream is an obvious place to look at remediation, but there are lots of other ideas for direct intervention, and they need to be evaluated and prioritized according to various criteria—cost, effectiveness, speed, all that.”

Edgardo grinned. “So—we are going to become global biosphere managers. We are going to terraform the Earth!”

“We already are,” Diane replied. “The problem is we don’t know how.”

Later that day Frank joined the noon running group, going with Edgardo and Kenzo down to the gym to dress and join Bob and Clark, from the Antarctic program on the seventh floor. The group was sometimes larger than this, sometimes smaller. They ran various routes, usually on old rail beds now converted into bike and running trails all through the area. Their usual lunchtime special ran parallel to Route 66 east for a while, then back around the curve of the Potomac and west back to NSF.

They ran at talking speed, which for this group meant about an eight-minute mile pace. A lot of the talking came from Edgardo, riffing on one thing or another. He liked to make connections; he liked to question things. He didn’t believe in anything. Even the scientific method was to him a kind of ad hoc survival attempt, a not-very—successful concoction of emergency coping mechanisms. Which belief did not, however, keep him from working maniacally on every project thrown his way, nor from partying late almost every night at various Latin venues. He was from Buenos Aires originally, and this, he said, explained everything about him. “All of us porteños are the same.”

“There’s no one like you, Edgardo,” Bob pointed out.

“On the contrary. In Buenos Aires everyone is like me. How else could we survive? We’ve lived the end of the world ten times already. What to do after that? You just put Piazzolla on the box and dance on, my friend. You laugh like a fool.”

You certainly do, Frank didn’t say. Of course Edgardo also did mathematics with applications in quantum computing, cryptology, and bioalgorithms, the last of which was the only aspect of his work that Frank understood. It was clear to him that at DARPA Edgardo must have had his fingers in all kinds of pics, subjects that Frank was much more interested in now than he had ever been before.

Where it paralleled Route 66 the running path became a thin concrete walk immediately north of the freeway, between the cars and the soundwall, with only a chain-link fence separating them from the roaring traffic to their right. The horribleness of it always made Edgardo grin. At midday when they usually ran it was totally exposed to the sun, but there was nothing for it but to put your head down and sweat through the smog.

“You really should run with an umbrella hat on like I do.” Edgardo looked ridiculous with this tall contraption on his saturnine head, but he claimed it kept him cool.

“That’s what hair is for, right?”

“Male pattern baldness has taken that away as an option for me, as I am sure you have noticed.”

“Wouldn’t that make baldness maladaptive?”

“Maladaptive in more ways than heat control, my friend.”

“Did you read that book, Why We Run? Explains how everything about us comes from adaptations to running? Even hair staying on the tops of our heads?”

Edgardo made a rude noise. ” Why We Run, Why We Love, Why We Reason, all these are the same, they are simply titles for the bestseller list.”

“Why We Run was good,” Frank objected. “It had stuff on the physiology of endurance. And it talked about how lots of native peoples ran animals down, over a matter of several days, even deer and antelope. The animals were faster, but the chase group would keep on pounding away until they wore the animals out.”

“Tortoise and hare.”

“I’m definitely a tortoise.”

“I’m going to write one called Why We Shit” Edgardo declared. “I’ll go into all the details of digestion, and compare ours to other species, and describe all the poisons we take in and then have to process or pass through, or get poisoned by. By the time I’m done no one will ever want to eat again.”

“So it could be the next diet book too.”

“That’s right! Atkins, South Beach, and me. The Alfonso Diet. Eat nothing but information! Digest that for once and never shit at all.”

“Like on Atkins, right?”

They left 66 for the river, passed through trees, and then the sun beat down on them again.

“What did you think of Diane’s meeting?” Frank asked Edgardo when they were bringing up the rear.

“That was pretty good,” Edgardo said. “Diane is really going for it. Whoever heads these agencies can make a lot of difference in how they function, I think. There are constraints on what each agency does, and the turf battles are fierce.

But if an agency head were to get an idea and go after it aggressively, it could get interesting. So it’s good to have her pushing. What’s going to surprise her is what vicious opposition she’s going to get from certain other agencies. There are people out there really committed to the status quo, let us say.”

They caught up with Bob and Kenzo and Clark, who were discussing the various odd climate interventions they had heard proposed.

Bob said, “I like the one about introducing a certain bacterial agent to animal feed that would then live in the gut and greatly reduce methane production.”

“Animal Flatulence Avoidance Feed! AF AF—the sound of Congress laughing when they hear about that one.”

“But it’s a good idea. Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO₂, and it’s mostly biologic in origin. It wouldn’t be much different than putting vitamin A in soy sauce. They’ve done that and saved millions of kids from rickets. How is it different?”

They laughed at Bob, but he was convinced that if they acted boldly, they could alter the climate deliberately and for the good. Kenzo wasn’t so sure; Edgardo didn’t think so.

“Just think of it as something like the Manhattan Project,” Bob said. “A war against disaster. Or like Apollo.”

Edgardo was his usual acid bath. “I wonder if you are fantasizing physically or politically.”

“Well we obviously can change the atmosphere, because we have.”

“Yes, but now we’ve triggered abrupt change. Global warming is a problem that could have taken centuries to fix, and now we have three years.”

“Maybe less!” Kenzo bragged.

“Well, heck,” Bob said, unperturbed. “It’ll be a matter of making things up as we go along.”

Frank liked the sound of that.

They ran in silence for a while. Fleeting consciousness of the pack; immersion in the moment. Slipping slickly in your own sweat.

“Hotter than hell out here.”

After these runs Frank would shower and spend the afternoons working, feeling sharper than at any other time of the day. Mornings were for talking and prepping, afternoons were for work. Even algorithm work, where the best he could do these days was try to understand Yann’s papers, now growing scarcer as Small Delivery made his work confidential.

There was always more to do than there was time to get it done, so he pitched in to the items on the list and set his watch’s alarm for five, a trick he had picked up from Anna, so he would not forget and work deep into the evening. Then he cranked until it beeped. These hours disappeared in a subjective flow where they felt like minutes.

More work was accomplished than there is time to tell, ranging from discussions in house to communications with other people in other organizations, to the endless Sisyphean labor of processing jackets, which is what they called the grant proposals, never mind they were all onscreen now. No matter how high in the Foundation a person got, and no matter how important his or her other tasks might be, there was always the inevitable question from above: how many jackets did you process today? And so really there was no conceivable end to the work that could be done. Given Diane’s interests now, there could never be enough networking with the outside world, and this of course brought Frank news of what everyone else was doing; and sometimes in the afternoons, first listening to a proposal to genetically engineer kelp to produce bulbs filled with ready-to-burn carbohydrates, then talking for an hour with the UNEP officer in town to plan a tidal energy capture system that placed a barge on a ratcheted piling in the tidal zone, then conferring with a group of NGO science officers concerning the Antarctic microwave project, and then speaking to people in an engineering consortium of government/university/industry groups about cheap efficient photovoltaics, he would come out of it to the high beeping of his watch alarm, dizzy at the touch of the technological sublime, feeling that a good array of plans existed already—that if they could enact this array, it would go a long way toward averting catastrophe. Perhaps they were already in the process of doing so. It was actually hard to tell; so much was happening at any one time that any description of the situation had some truth in it, from “desperate crisis, extinction event totally ignored” to “minor problems robustly dealt with.” It was therefore necessary to forge on in ignorance of the whole situation.

He put the finishing touches on the RFP for the Maxes, while also reassuring those in the NSF hardcore who felt that the Foundation was thereby creating its own evolutionary successors. It was easy in these arguments to see the way people thought of agencies in terms of human qualities, so that the agencies ended up behaving in the world like individuals in terms of power, will, skills, and effectiveness. Some were amazingly effective for their size, others were permanently hampered by personality and history. NSF’s ten billion a year made it a fairly small player on the national and world stage, but it was in a critical position, like the coxswain on a rowing team. It could coordinate the other scientific bodies, and to a certain extent industry; and exerting itself in that way, as it was now under Diane’s direction, there seemed to be some kind of tail-wagging-dog possibilities not unsupported even by the most reputable and straightforward of cascade mathematics. All the suprahuman personalities represented by the various scientific bodies were mutually reinforcing each other now, in a kind of ad hoc team surge against the problem at hand. Anna had already helped them to identify the scientific infrastructural elements currently in place in the federal government and internationally, and transfer-of-infrastructure programs initiated as a result of her studies were already getting assistance and equipment. In Frank’s mind, when he thought about it, science itself began to look like a pack on the move, big shadowy figures loping across the cave wall into the fray.

So he did his part, working hard in the building, learning about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its potential detachment from its seabed perch. Learning of plans to run oil tankers and other shipping over the pole from Japan to Scotland and Norway and back, halving the distance and making the Arctic Ocean a trading lake like the Mediterranean—

Then his watch alarm would go off, surprising him again, and it was off into the long green end of the day, livid and perspiring. Happy at the sudden release from the sitting at desk, the abstract thinking, the global anxiety (cave painting, Atlas figure, desperate effort to hold world aloft).

Because all that was only part of the optimodal project! Looking for animals, playing chess with Chessman, reading in the restaurants, sleeping in his tree…

These summer days usually cooled off a little in the last hour before dark. The sun disappeared into the forest, and then in the remaining hour or two of light, if Frank had managed to get over to Rock Creek Park in time, he would join the frisbee golfers, and run through the shadows throwing a disk and chasing it. Chasing the other players. Frank loved the steeplechase aspect of it, and the way it made him feel afterward. The things it taught him about himself: once he was running full tilt and a stride came down on a concealed hole with only his toes catching the far side, but by the time he was aware of that his foot and leg had stiffened enough that he had already pushed off using only the toes. How had he done that? No warning, instant reaction, how had there been time? In thousandths of a second his body had sensed the absence of ground, stiffened the appropriate muscles by the appropriate amount, and launched into an improvised solution, giving him about the same velocity a normal stride would have had.

Another time the reverse happened, and he stepped on a hidden bump under the front of his foot. But he knew that only after he had already given up on the stride and was catching himself on the other foot, thus saving himself a sprained ankle.

Things like this happened all the time. So just how fast was the brain? It appeared to be almost inconceivably fast, and in those split seconds, extremely creative and decisive. Indeed, running steeplechase and watching what his body did, especially after unforeseen problems were solved, Frank had to conclude that he was the inadvertent jailer of a mute genius. His running foot would come down on nothing at all, he would fly forward in a tuck and roll, somersault back to his feet and run on as if he had practiced the move for years, only better—how could it be? Who did that?

Eleven million bits of data per second were taken in at the sensory endings of the nervous system, he read. In each second all incoming data were scanned, categorized, judged for danger, prioritized, and reacted to, this going on continuously, second after second; and at the same time his brain was doing all that unconsciously, in his conscious mentation he could be singing with the birds, or focusing on a throw, or thinking about what it meant to be under surveillance. Parallel processing of different activities in the parcellated mind, at different speeds, taking from microseconds to a matter of years, if not decades.

Thus the joy of running in the forest, giving him little glimpses of the great unconscious Mind.

Throwing was just as fun as running, or even more so, being more conscious and easier to notice. He looked, aimed, calculated, tried for a certain result. It had none of running’s effortless adjustment, it was much more erratic and imprecise. Still, when the disk flew through the trees to its target and crashed into the chains and fell in a basket, it shared some of the miraculous quality of his tumbles; it did not seem physically possible. And if he thought about it too much he could not do it, his throws immediately degenerated into waldo approximations. You had to “play unconscious,” letting unfelt parts of the brain do the calculating, while still consciously directing that the throws be attempted.

So he played on, in a kind of ecstatic state. There was some quality to the game that seemed to transcend sports as he had known them; not even climbing resembled it. Surely it was closely analogous to the hominid hunting and gathering experience that was central to the emergence of humanity. As Frank ran the park with the guys he sometimes thought about how it might have gone: I throw. I throw the rock. I throw the rock at the rabbit. I throw the rock at the rabbit in order to kill it. If I kill the rabbit I will eat it. I am hungry. If I throw well I will not be hungry. A rock of fist size was thrown just so (the first scientist). Rock of just this size, of just this weight, was thrown at just under the full velocity of which one was capable, at a trajectory beginning just above horizontal. It hit the rabbit in the leg but the rabbit ran away. When a rock hits a rabbit in the head it will usually stop. Hypothesis! Test it again!

The players collapsed at the end, sat around the final hole puffing and sweating.

“Forty-two minutes ten seconds,” Robert read from his watch. “Pretty good.”

“We were made to do this,” Frank said. “We evolved to do this.”

The others merely nodded.

“We don’t do it,” Robin said. “The gods do it through us.”

“Robin is pre-breakdown of the bicameral mind.”

“Frisbee is Robin’s religion.”

“Well of course,” Robin said.

“Oh come on,” Spencer scolded, untying his fiery dreads from their topknot. “It’s bigger than that.”

Frank laughed with the others.

“It is,” Spencer insisted. “Bigger and older.”

“Older than religion?”

“Older than humanity. Older than Homo sapiens.”

Frank stared at Spencer, surprised by this chiming with his evolutionary musings. “How do you mean?”

Spencer grabbed his gold disk by its edge. “There’s a prehistoric tool called the Acheulian hand axe. They were made for hundreds of thousands of years without any changes in design. Half a million years! That makes it a lot older than Homo sapiens. It was a Homo erectus tool. And the thing is, the archeologists named them hand axes without really knowing what they were. They don’t actually look like they would make good hand axes.”

“How so?” Frank said.

“They’re sharpened all the way around, so where are you going to hold the thing? There isn’t a good place to hold it if you hit things with it. So it couldn’t have been a hand axe. And yet there are millions of them in Africa and Europe. There are dry lakebeds in Africa where the shorelines are coated with these things.”

“Bifaces,” Frank said, looking at his golf disk and remembering illustrations in articles he had read. “But they weren’t round.”

“No, but almost. And they’re flat, that’s the main thing. If you were to throw one it would fly like a frisbee.”

“You couldn’t kill anything very big.”

“You could kill small things. And this guy Calvin says you could spook bigger animals.”

“Hobbes doesn’t agree,” Robert put in.

“No really!” Spencer cried, grinning. “This is a real theory, this is what archeologists are saying now about these bifaces. They even call it the killer frisbee theory.”

The others laughed.

“But it’s true,” Spencer insisted, whipping his dreads side-to-side. “It’s obviously true. You can feel it when you throw.”

“You can, Rasta man.”

“Everyone can!” He appealed to Frank: “Am I right?”

“You are right,” Frank said, still laughing at the idea. “I sort of remember that killer frisbee theory. I’m not sure it ever got very far.”

“So? Scientists are not good at accepting new theories.”

“Well, they like evidence before they do that.”

“Sometimes things are just too obvious! You can’t be throwing out a theory just because people think frisbees are some kind of hippie thing.”

“Which they are,” Robert pointed out.

Frank said, “No. You’re right.” Still, he had to laugh; listening to Spencer was like seeing himself in a funhouse mirror, hearing one of his theories being parodied by an expert mimic. The wild glee in Spencer’s blue eyes suggested there was some truth to this interpretation. He would have to be more careful in what he said.

But the facts of the situation remained, and could not be ignored. His unconscious mind, his deep mind, was at that very moment humming happily through all its parcellations. It was a total response. Deep inside lay an ancient ability to throw things at things, waiting patiently for its moment of redeployment.

“That was good,” he said as he got up to leave.

“Google Acheulian hand axes,” Spencer said. “You’ll see.”

The next day Frank did that, and found it was pretty much as Spencer had said. Certain anthropologists had proposed that the rapid evolutionary growth of the human brain was caused by the mentation necessary for throwing things at a target; and a subset of these considered the bifaced hand axes to be their projectiles of choice, “killer frisbees,” as one William Calvin indeed called them. Used to stampede animals at waterholes, he claimed, after which the hominids pounced on animals knocked over by the rush. The increase in predictive power needed to throw the flattened rocks accurately had led to the brain’s frontal lobe growth.

Frank still had to laugh, despite his will to believe. As one of the editors of the Journal of Sociobiology he had seen a lot of crazy theories explaining hominid evolution, and he recognized immediately that this was another specimen to add to the list. But so what? It was as plausible as most of the others, and given his recent experiences in the park, more convincing than many.

He stared at a website photo of a hand axe as he thought about his life in the park. He had written commentaries for the Journal suggesting that people would be healthier if they lived more like their paleolithic ancestors had. Not that they should starve themselves from time to time, or needed to kill all the meat they ate—just that incorporating more paleolithic behaviors might increase health and well-being. After all, a fairly well-identified set of behaviors, repeated for many generations, had changed their ancestors a great deal; had created the species Homo sapiens; had blown their brains up like balloons. Surely these were behaviors most likely to lead to well-being now. And to the extent they neglected these behaviors, and sat around inside boxes as if they were nothing but brains and fingertips, the unhealthier and unhappier they would be.

Frank clicked to this commentary and its list of all the paleolithic behaviors anthropologists had ever proposed as a stimulant to the great brain expansion. How many of these behaviors was he performing now?

It appeared by these criteria that he was living a pretty healthy life. The paleolithic pleasures, plus modern dental care; what could be nicer? Optimodal in the best possible sense.

He went back to the Acheulian hand axe link list, and checked out a commercial site called Montana Artifacts. It turned out that this site offered for sale an Acheulian axe found near Madrid, dated at between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand years old. “Classic teardrop shaped of a fine textured gray quartzite. The surface has taken a smooth lustrous polish on the exposed faces. Superb specimen.” One hundred and ninety-five dollars. With a few taps on his keyboard Frank bought it.

Primates in airplanes. aack!

Flying now made Frank a little nervous. He gripped his seat arms, reminded himself of the realities of risk assessment, fell asleep. He woke when they started descending toward Logan. Landing on water, whoah—but no. The runway showed up in the nick of time, as always.

Then into Boston, a city Frank liked. The conference was at MIT, with some meetings across the river at Boston University.

Quickly Frank saw that getting an opportunity to talk in private with Dr. Taolini would be hard. She was involved with the organization of the event, and much in demand. The one time Frank saw her alone, in the hall before her own presentation, she was talking on her cell phone.

But she saw him and waved him over, quickly ending her call. “Hello, Frank. I didn’t know you were going to be here.”

“I decided to come at the last minute.”

“Good, good. You’re going to tell us about these new institutes?”

“That’s right. But I’d like to talk to you one-on-one about them, if you have the time. I know you’re busy.”

“Yes, but let’s see …” checking her cell phone’s calendar. “Can you meet me at the end of my talk?”

“Sure, I’m going to be there anyway.”

“That’s very nice.”

Her talk was on algorithms for reading the genomes of methanogens. She spoke rapidly and emphatically, very used to the limelight: a star, even at MIT, which tended to be an all-star team. Stylish in a gray silk dress, black hair cut at shoulder length, framing a narrow face with distinct, even chiseled features. Big brown eyes under thick black eyebrows, roving the audience between slides, conveying a powerful impression of intelligence and vivacity, of pleasure in the moment.

After her talk many people, mostly men, clustered around her with what seemed to Frank a more-than-scientific interest. Turning to answer a question she saw him and smiled. “I’ll be just a minute.” Tiny rush of pleasure at that; ha ha, I get to take the beauty away, ooooop!

Her voice was low and scratchy, indeed it would be nasal if it weren’t so low. A kind of oboe or bassoon sound, very attractive. Some kind of accent, maybe Boston Italian, but so faint it was impossible for Frank to identify.

Then the others had been dealt with, and he was the only one left. He smiled awkwardly, feeling alert and on edge.

“Nice talk.”

“Oh thanks. Shall we go outside? I could use some coffee and maybe a bite.”

“Sure, that would be nice.”

They walked out into the bright sunlight on the Charles. Francesca suggested a kiosk on the other side of the Mass. Ave. bridge, and Frank followed her onto it happily; Boston’s river was full of light, open to the wind. It had good feng shui.

They talked about the dedicated institutes that NSF was planning, and Francesca said she had done a post-doc at the Max Planck in Bremen and been impressed. Then they reached the kiosk, bought lattes and scones, walked back onto the bridge. Frank stopped to look at a women’s eight, sculling underneath them like a big water bug. He would have liked to linger there, but Francesca shivered.

“I get cold out here,” she said. “It’s like Byrd said—the coldest he ever got was on the bridges over the Charles.”

“Byrd the polar explorer?”

“Yes. My husband did work on the Greenland ice cores, and he likes to read the polar classics. He told me Byrd said that, because I was always complaining about how cold I get.”

“Well okay, back to land then.”

“There’s some benches in the sun just over there.” She pointed.

“Didn’t Byrd fake getting to the poles?”

She laughed. “Maybe that explains why here is the coldest he ever got.”

“No, but didn’t he?”

“I don’t know, but he definitely wintered on the Ross Ice Shelf.”

“You couldn’t do that now.”

“Sure you could. There are people living on the big pieces of it still floating around. That’s what Jack tells me. Icebergs as big as Massachusetts, and so people have settled on them.”

“Fun. What does he do?”

“Paleoclimatology. He’s been studying the Younger Dryas for a long time now.”

“Really! That’s the climate we’re dropping into again, I hear.”

“Yes. He’s often away giving talks about it. It’s quite a scramble with the kids.”

“I bet. How many do you have?”

“Two. Angie is eight, Tom is five.”

“Wow. You must be busy.”

“Yes, it’s totally crazy.”

They sat on a bench looking out at the river, eating their scones and talking. She was a beautiful woman. Frank had not fully noticed this during the panel meeting at NSF. Of course he was well aware of the famous experiment in which an attractive woman approached men on a bridge with some question that allowed her plausibly to ask the men to call her later, after which seventy percent of the men on the bridge had called, as compared to only thirty percent accosted in the same way in a park. So, very possibly this was another example of the bridge effect. But whatever. She looked good. Black tangled curls framing sharp Mediterranean features; neat intilting teeth; all of a piece, stylish and intelligent. If you were to play the game of choosing which movie star should play her, you’d have to go right to one of the ultimate Italian exotics, a middle-aged Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale.

A joy even to watch her eat; and at this observation Frank could not help remembering another paper, on human female sexual attractiveness, which had argued that even facial beauty consisted of signs of reproductive prowess, symmetry revealing undamaged DNA, widely spaced eyes meaning good eyesight, and prominent cheekbones and a gracile jaw indicating “masticatory efficiency”—at which point in Frank’s reading of the paper Anna had looked in his door to see why he was laughing so hard.

“If you can chew your food well, it’s sexy!” he had informed her, and handed her the article while he continued to chortle convulsively. Sociobiology could be so stupid! Anna too had laughed, her gorgeous mirth pealing through the halls.

Frank grinned again thinking of it, watching Francesca sip her latte. No doubt she masticated very efficiently. And had legs fast enough to escape predators, hips wide enough to give birth safely, mammary glands generous enough to feed infants, yes, sure, she had quite a figure, as far as one could tell under her dress—and of course one could tell pretty damned well. She would certainly have many successful offspring, and therefore was beautiful. All so much crap! No reductio ad absurdum was more absurd.

“Yes, it’s very busy,” she was saying between mastications, in response to a question he didn’t remember asking; she appeared to be unaware of his train of thought, but maybe not; he might be staring. “It works out—usually—but it feels so crazy. I don’t know how, but—” swallow “—things just seem to get busier and busier.”

Frank nodded as he chewed. “It’s true,” he said. “True for me, and I’m not even married.”

She grinned. “But that can make you even busier, right?” Leaning into his shoulder slightly with hers, giving him a conspiratorial bump.

Startled, Frank had to agree. There were lots of ways to be busy, he said, and his days were very full. She sipped her latte, looking relaxed and somehow pleased. Not flirtatious, but expansive. She could do what she wanted; what man was going to object? She licked coffee from her upper lip, neat pink tongue like a cat’s. For sure the symmetry-as-beauty hypothesis was wrong; Frank had a tendency to zero in on the asymmetries in other people’s faces, and he had often noted how it was precisely the asymmetry that drew or hooked the eye, that tugged at it like a magnet. As now, seeing the way Francesca’s sharp nose tilted very slightly to the left then back. Magnetic.

Of course he was envious of her too. Lab, tenure, home, partner, children: she had it all. And seemed relaxed and happy, despite her talk about the crazy pace. Fulfilled. As Frank’s mom would have said, in one of her most annoying formulations, “She has it all put together, doesn’t she?” At this point in his life Frank doubted that anybody on Earth “had it all put together” in the way his mom meant. But if anyone did, this woman might.

So: Frank chatted on happily, full of admiration, respect, envy, doubt, resentment, suspicion, and a lust that was perhaps bridge-induced but nevertheless real. He had to mask that part. She would be used to seeing it in men, no doubt. Nonconscious regions of the mind were very sensitive to that.

He would also have to be very circumspect when it came to inquiring about her business affairs. This was one way of characterizing what he had come up to do, and she was done with her scone, and no doubt would soon suggest returning to her duties, so now was the time.

But it was a subject that scientists did not often discuss at academic meetings, as it was too much like prying into matters of personal income. How are you turning your scientific work into money? How much do you make? These questions weren’t asked.

He tried a roundabout course. “Is the teaching load heavy here?”

It was.

“Do you have any administrative duties?”

She did.

“And you do some consulting too, I think you said?”

“Yes,” she said, looking slightly surprised, as she had not said any such thing. “Just a little. It doesn’t take much time. A company in London, another in Atlanta.”

Frank nodded. “I used to do some of that in San Diego. The biotechs can use all the help they can get. Although they seem to have a hard time turning lab results into products. Like the stuff we evaluated on that panel last fall.”

“Right, that was interesting.”

This was likely to be mere politeness talking. But then she glanced at him, went on: “I saw one proposal there that I thought was a good one, that the panel ended up turning down.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. By a Yann Pierzinski.”

“Oh yes. I remember. That was a good one. I was the outside member of his doctoral committee at Caltech. He does really interesting work.”

“Yes,” she said. “But the panel didn’t agree.”

“No, I was surprised at that.”

“Me too. So when Small Delivery told me they were looking for a biomathematician, I recommended him.”

“Oh, is that what happened?”

“Yes.”

Her irises were a kind of mahogany color, speckled with lighter browns. Was this the face of what science could become, so vivacious and sophisticated?

“Well,” he said carefully, “good for him. I liked his proposal too.”

“You didn’t seem to at the time.”

“Well—I was on his doctoral committee. And I try not to be one of the evaluators in my panels anyway.”

“No?”

“No. I just run the panel. I don’t want to sway anyone.”

“Then you must have to be careful which proposals you assign to Stuart Thornton,” she said with a brief ironic smile.

“Oh I don’t know!” he said defensively, startled. “Do you think so?”

“Hmm.” She watched him.

“I guess I know what you mean. It was probably a mistake to invite him on the panel at all. But, you know.” He waved a hand: people legitimately on the cutting edge deserved to be asked, no matter their personalities.

She frowned very slightly, as if she did not agree, or did not like him pretending she did not know what he had done.

Frank forged on. “Anyway it sounds like Yann ended up all right, thanks to you.”

“Yes. Hopefully so.” She sipped her latte. Her fingers were long, her fingernails polished with a clear gloss. A thin wedding band was the only jewelry she wore. Frank looked down, unwilling to meet her sharp gaze. Her shoes were open-toed, her toenails colored pink. Frank had always considered toenail polish to be a kind of intelligence test that its users had embarrassingly failed; but here was Dr. Taolini, tenured at MIT, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, exposing pink toenails to the world without embarrassment. He would have to rethink some of his opinions.

“Still,” he said tentatively, “even though Yann has ended up all right, I’d like to get him into one of these new institutes.”

“Maybe you can,” she said. “Multiple appointments aren’t that unusual anymore.”

“In academia, anyway. Do you think his contract would allow for that kind of thing?”

She shrugged, made a little gesture of her own; how should I know, I’m just a consultant.

He had learned what he was going to learn about her connection to Yann. Pressing further would look weird. She basked in the windy sun, would soon want to go back in to the conference.

He could ask her outright if she knew anything about the surveillance. He could share what he knew. It was another prisoner’s dilemma: they both knew things the other could probably benefit from knowing, but it was a risk to bring them up; the other might defect. The safest thing was to defect preemptively. But Frank wanted to try the more generous strategies these days, and so he wanted to tell her: We’re being watched by Homeland Security, in a surveillance clustered around Pierzinski. Did you know? Why do you think that is? What do you think is going on?

But then she could very justifiably ask, how do you know? And then he would be stuck. He could not say, because I’ve fallen in love with a spook who kissed me in an elevator, and she told me all about it. That just wasn’t something he wanted to say to this woman.

Although in another way he did; it would be great to be close enough to this person to confide in her. She might laugh, might lean into his shoulder again, to draw out more of the tale.

But in fact he wasn’t that close to her. So he couldn’t talk about it.

A different approach occurred to him. “I’m getting interested in finding algorithms or other rubrics for sorting through the various climate proposals we’ve gotten, to see if some are worth jumping on right now. Ways of checking not only the physical possibilities, which is the easy part in some senses, but also the economic and political viability of the plans.”

“Yes?” she said, interested.

“I read about something I think came out of MIT, of course there’s a million things coming out of MIT, but maybe you’ve heard of this one, a kind of idea futures market? You gather a group of stakeholders, and sort the ideas by how much money people are willing to risk on them?”

“Yes, do you mean that simulation program they’ve written, for market makers?”

“Yes,” Frank said. “I guess so.”

She said, “I heard about it. To me it sounds like one of those situations where simulation misses the point. You might need real experts risking real money, to get the kind of feedback a futures market is supposed to give you.”

“Yes, I wondered about that myself.”

“So, I don’t know. You should talk to Angelo Stavros.”

“What department?” Frank said, getting out his phone to tap it in; then suddenly he recalled that his phone might be fully surveiled.

“Economics—but what is it?” She was watching him closely now, and he couldn’t be sure if she knew more about the idea futures market or not.

“I was just thinking you’re probably right. In the end it’s going to take the usual analysis of the options, like we always have done before.”

“Another panel, you mean.”

“Yes,” he laughed ruefully, “I suppose so.”

Her smile was suddenly wicked, and over it her eyes blazed, they italicized her words: “Better not invite Thornton.”

He walked the north shore of the Charles, enjoying the wind that ruffled the water.

So. Francesca Taolini appeared to have guessed what he had tried to do on that panel. Maybe putting Thornton on a panel was too blatant, like throwing a rock—thus drawing her attention, perhaps even sparking extra interest in Pierzinski’s proposal.

This realization was a shock, small but profound, like the shove of shoulder to shoulder. Balance thrown off. Presumably it would come back after a while. Meanwhile a shudder, an itch, an ache. In short, desire.

He found that he had become a seer of beauty in women. On the river path in Boston it was mostly expressed as youth and intelligence. That made sense; sixty degree-giving institutions, some three hundred thousand college students; that meant at least one hundred fifty thousand more nubile young women than ordinary demographics would suggest. Maybe that was why men stayed in Boston when their college years were over, maybe that explained why they were so intellectually hyperactive, so frustrated, so alcoholic, such terrible drivers. It all seemed right to Frank. He was full of yearning, the women on the river walk were all goddesses set loose in the sun. The image of Francesca Taolini even somehow made him angry; she had flirted with him casually, toyed with him. He wanted his Caroline to call him again, he wanted to kiss her and more. He wanted her.

Back in Rock Creek Park it was not like that. Frank hiked in to the picnic tables late that night, and Zeno saw him and bellowed, “Hey it’s the Professor! Hey, wanna buy a fuck? She’ll do it for five dollars!”

The guys jeered at this, while the woman sitting in their midst rolled her eyes and continued to knit. She’d heard it all before. Blond, square, stoical; Zeno and the rest were in fact pleased to have her there, they just showed it in stupid ways.

“No thank you,” Frank said, and pulled a sixpack from a grocery bag to stop Zeno’s foolery before it went any further.

The woman shook her head when offered a beer. “Day sixty-five,” she said to Frank with a brief gap-toothed smile. “Day sixty-five, and here I am still hanging out with these bozos.”

“Yarrr!” they cheered.

“Congratulations,” Frank said.

“On what,” Zeno quipped, “staying sober, or hanging with us?”

High humor in the park.

There were very few women to be seen out there, Frank thought as he sat at her table; and those he saw seemed sad drabs, just barely getting by. Homelessness was hard on anyone, but seemed to damage them more. They could not pretend it was some kind of adventure.

And yet the economy insisted on a minimum of five percent unemployment, to create the proper “wage pressure.” Millions of people who wanted jobs went unhired and therefore couldn’t afford a home, therefore suffered from “food insecurity,” so that businesses could keep wages low. These people.

Unlike Frank. He was a dilettante here, dabbling, slumming. Choice made all the difference. He could have found a place to rent, he could have afforded a deposit and moved in. Instead he hung out tinkering with their crappy fire, then playing chess with Chessman, losing four games but making the last of them a real donnybrook. And when Chessman departed with his twenty, Frank got up and hiked into the night, made sure no one was following, went to his tree, called down Miss Piggy, and climbed up into his treehouse, there to lie down on the best bed in the world, and read by the light of his Coleman lantern, in the clatter of the wind in the leaves. Let the wind blow the world out of his hair. Rockabye baby, in the tree top. It was a relief to be there after the strangeness of the day.

Was curly hair adaptive? Tangled curls, black as a crow’s wing?

He wanted her.

Damn it anyway. Sociobiology was a bad habit you could never get rid of. Once it invaded your thoughts it was hard to forget that human beings were apes, with desires shaped by life on the savannah, so that every move in lab politics or boardroom maneuvers became clearly a shove for food or sex, every verbal putdown from a male boss like the back of the hand from some hairy silverback, every flirt and dismissal from a woman like the head-turning-aside baboon, refusing acknowledgment, saying: You don’t get to fuck me and if you try my sisters will beat you up; and every acquiescence like the babs who accidentally had their pink butts stuck out when you went by, saying: I’m in estrus you can fuck me if you want, shouldering you companionably or staring off into space as if bored—

But the problem was, thinking of interactions with other people in this way was not actually very helpful to him. For one thing it could often reduce him to speechlessness. Like at the gym for instance, my lord if that was not the savannah he didn’t know what was—and if that was the primal discourse, then he’d rather pass, thank you very much, and be a solitary. He was too inhibited to just lay it out there, and too honest to try to say it in euphemistic code. He was too self-conscious. He was too chicken. There was an awesome power in sex, he wanted it to go right. He wanted it to be part of a whole monogamy. He wanted love to be real. Science could go fuck itself!

Or: become useful. Become a help, for God’s sake. It was the same in his personal life as it was for the world at large; if science wasn’t helping then it was a sterile waste of time. It had to help or it was all for naught, and the world still nothing but a miserable fuck-up. And him too.

The party traveling to Khembalung had grown to ten: the Quiblers and Frank, Drepung, Sucandra, Padma, and Rudra Cakrin, and the Khembali woman Qang, who ran the embassy’s big house in Arlington.

Dulles to L.A. to Tokyo to Bangkok to Calcutta to Khembalung; for two days they lived in long vibrating rooms in the air, taking short breaks in big rooms on the ground. They ate meals, watched movies, went to the bathroom, and slept. In theory it should have been somewhat like a rainy weekend at home.

However, Charlie thought, a rainy weekend at the Quibler household could be a royal pain in the ass. It was not a good idea to confine Joe for that long. At home they would make things for him to do, find ways for him to let off some steam. They would go out in the rain and party. Now that was not an option.

They had flown business class, courtesy of the Khembalis, which gave them more room, though Anna could not help being concerned about the expense. Charlie told her not to worry about it, but she knew the Khembali budget and Charlie didn’t. She never found it reassuring when someone who knew less about a situation than she did told her not to worry about it.

On the first plane Joe wanted to investigate every nook and cranny, and so Charlie followed him around, returning the smiles of those passengers who did in fact smile. Joe ran a route like a long figure 8, chanting “Airplane! Airplane! Airplane!” When the food and drink carts filled the aisles he had to be lifted into his seat, struggling as he declared “Airplane! Truck!” (the drink cart) “People!” Eventually he ran out of gas and fell asleep curled in his seat next to Rudra Cakrin, who nodded off over him, occasionally holding Joe’s wrist or ankle between two gnarled fingers. Anna sat on the other side of Joe, using up her laptop battery all in one go. Across the aisle from her Charlie sat down and pulled out the seatback phone to make some calls. Anna tried to ignore him and work, but she heard him say hi to Wade Norton, a colleague down in Antarctica, and listened in.

“You saw twin otters? How did you know they were twins? … Oh. Uh huh. You saw Roosevelt Island, nice. How could that be the first time anyone has seen it? … Oh!… How many meters? … Where’d all the ice go? … Wow. Jesus. That is a lot… Is that the beginning of the … the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, right I know. Sea level and all. How big is this piece? Wow… Yeah, of course. We’ll be fine. We won’t be there but a few days anyway.”

Charlie listened for a while. Then: “Hey, Roy! I’m glad you were able to click in. What’s up? … Andrea doesn’t? Hey does that mean you two are speaking to each other again? Ha ha… No, I don’t suffer under any illusions there, but Phil doesn’t listen to you guys either… Oh right. From the South Pole, I’m sure… I thought you said she was a giant… Six foot four sounds giant to me… You are not, you’re six feet at the most! Elevator shoes… She’d be what, six ten? Yeah. Ha… No, I think it’s his to lose! The happy man is like Hoover, and none of the other Republicans are happy men. They’re Angry Men. They’ve had the White House and Congress for so long it’s made them bitter. It’s just such an effort making it look like their program makes sense. It makes them angry and resentful. No. It’s not a process you want to follow to its natural end. I agree… No, Phil would be fine. He’d love it. It’s us who would suffer, you know… Well, because I thought it was a good idea! What else are we going to do anyway? We’ve got to try something, and Phil is our best shot… I know. I know… Yeah, just ride it… Well, the more fool you! I’m off to Shambhala and Wade is at the South Pole. You can have D.C., ha!”

He rang off, leaned back looking pleased.

“You’re making trouble,” Anna observed.

“Yes. Someone’s got to do it.”

Hours later they floated down over the green fields of Japan, a startling sight if you were expecting nothing but Tokyo-like cityscapes. Then out of their seats, up a jetway, feeling slightly deranged; running around an airport acting as marshal or warden to a two-year-old minimum-security prisoner; then they were in another plane and rumbling into the air again, with another long day facing them. Nick kept on reading Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution. Charlie and Anna kept trading off the pursuit of the indefatigable Joe, Anna having given up making Charlie do it all, as they had both known she would. Besides, her battery was too low for her to keep working.

Joe seemed intent on confirming what Anna kept telling him, that this plane was identical to the one they had been on before. Except on this one the passengers seemed less amused by an exploratory bang on the knee.

Bangkok’s airport hotel, tall and white, stood over its big pool in intense sunlight. Dazed wandering after Joe in the turquoise shallows, trying to stay awake and unsunburnt, trying to keep Joe out of the deep end. The water was too warm. Then back to a cool room, sleep, but then the alarm oh my, middle of the night, ultragroggy, pack up and off to the airport again to face its long lines, and get on what looked like the same plane. Except on this one, orchids were pinned to the back of every seat. Joe ate his before they could stop him. Anna went into her laptop’s encyclopedia to see if it could have been toxic. Apparently it could, but Joe showed no ill effects, and Charlie ate a petal of his orchid too, in Anna’s view merely compounding the problem with a very poorly designed follow-up experiment.

Nick had finished all his books, and now he listened as Charlie told Frank about Phil Chase running for president. Frank said, “What about you, Nick? Who do you think should be president?”

Nick’s brow furrowed, and Frank glanced at Anna—yes, she could feel that same frown in the muscles of her own forehead. Nick was often his mother’s son. Now Frank watched him ponder, and Anna thought, It’s the oblivious confronting the oblivious: Frank unaware of being condescending, Nick unaware of being condescended to. Maybe that meant it wasn’t happening.

“Well you see,” Nick said, “in Switzerland the executive branch is a seven-person council? And its members are voted in by the legislature. It means there’s diverse views in the executive branch, and it doesn’t dominate the other branches as much. Most Swiss people don’t even know the actual president’s name! He just like runs the council meetings.”

“That’s a good idea,” Frank said.

“The Swiss have lots of good ideas. We’ve been studying them in world gee.”

“Oh I see. You’ll have to tell me more about them.”

“It isn’t easy to amend the Constitution,” Charlie warned them.

Nick and Frank knew this. Nick said, “Maybe someone could run for president and tell everybody that if he won, he was going to like appoint a council to do his job.”

“Like Reagan!” Charlie said, laughing.

“It’s still a good idea,” Frank said.

Then their plane was descending again.

In Calcutta they zombied through a reception at the Khembali legation, dreaming on their feet; all except Joe, who slept on Charlie’s back; then they tumbled into beds, feeling the joy of horizontality; then the alarm went off again. “Ah God.” It was almost like being at home.

Back to the airport, off in a little sixteen-seater so loud that it made Joe squeal with joy. Up and east, over the mind-boggling combined delta of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the world’s largest delta, also a good percentage of Bangladesh. Looking down at it, Charlie shouted to Anna, “I’ll never call Washington, D.C., a swamp again!” Green-brown islands in a brown-green sea. The delta patterns ran south, and they flew down one brown-green channel until the islands lay more diffusely, also lower, many half-submerged, with drowned coastlines visible in shallows. The water ahead shifted in distinct jumps from brown-green to jade to sea blue.

One of the outermost islands, right on the border of the jade sea and the blue, had a shoreline accentuated by a brown ring. As they descended, the interior of this island differentiated into patterns of color, then into fields, roads, rooftops. In the final approach they saw that the brown ring was a dike, quite broad and fairly high. Suddenly it appeared to Anna as if the land inside the dike was slightly lower than the ocean around it. She hoped it was only an optical illusion.

Joe had mashed his face and hands against the window, looking down at the island and burbling: “Oh! My! Big truck! Big house! Ah fah. Oh! My!”

Frank, who had successfully slept through three-quarters of the flight, sat up on the other side of Joe, regarding him with a smile. “Ooooooooop!” he gibboned, egging him on. Joe cackled to hear it.

Touchdown.

They were greeted as they came off the plane by a large group of men, women, and children, all dressed in their finery, which meant ceremonial garb better suited to the roof of the world than the Bay of Bengal; and on closer examination Anna saw that the fabrics of many of the robes and headdresses wafted on the stiff hot sea breeze, being diaphanous cotton, silk, and nylon, though they were Tibetan in color and design. That was Khembalung in a nutshell.

Rudra Cakrin descended the plane first, with Drepung right behind him. A triumphant blaaaaaaaaaaaa of brass long horns shattered the air so violently it seemed it might squeeze out rain. This was the brazen sound that had alerted Anna to the existence of the Khembalis in the first place, on the day of their arrival in the NSF building.

Everyone receiving them bowed; they looked down upon the black hair and colorful headgear of several hundred people. Joe goggled to see it, mouth hanging open in a perfect O.

Descending into this throng they were surrounded by their hosts, including two women from the Khembalung Institute of Higher Learning, who introduced themselves to Anna; she had been corresponding with them by e-mail. They took the visitors in hand, leading them slowly through the crowd and introducing them to many of the people they passed.

Soon they were through the airport’s little building, and bundled into a van that drove them east on a broad, palm-lined boulevard of dusty white concrete. On each side extended Hat fields, divided by rows of trees or shrubbery. Small building complexes stood under drooping palm trees. Many of the plants looked desiccated, even brown.

“There has been drought for two years,” one of their guides explained. “This is the third monsoon season without rain, but we have hopes it will come soon. All South Asia has been suffering from these two bad monsoons in a row. We need the rain.”

Anna had heard a lot about this from her contacts with ABC, the “Asian Brown Cloud” study, which was trying to determine if the long-term persistence of particulates in the air of south Asia—mysterious in their exact origins, although clearly linked to the industrialization and deforesting in the region— had any causal effect on the drought.

In any case it made for a rather drab and stunted landscape. No plants they saw were native to the island, they were told as they drove through the dust cloud of the bus before theirs. Everything was tended; even the ground itself had been imported, to raise the island a meter or two higher. Nick asked where the extra ground had come from, and they told him that a few surrounding islands had been dredged up and deposited here, also used to provide the raw material for the dike. It had all been done under the direction of Dutch engineers some fifty years before. Very little had been done since then, as far as Anna had been able to determine. The dike was in sight through the trees wherever they went, raising the horizon a bit, so that it felt a little like driving around in a very large roofless room, blasted with hazy harsh sunlight, the sky like a white ceiling. The inner wall of the dike had been planted with flowerbeds that when in bloom would show the usual colors of the Tibetan palette— maroon and saffron, brown and bronze and red, all gone or muted now but the blue and black patches, which were made of painted stones.

In a little town they got out of the van and crossed a broad pedestrian esplanade. The sea breeze poured over them in a hot wave, briny and seaweedy. The smell of the other Sundarbans, perhaps.

“Will we see more swimming tigers?” Nick inquired. He observed everything with great interest, looking cool in his sunglasses. Joe had refused to wear his. He was taking in the scene so avidly he was in danger of giving himself whiplash, trying to see everything at once. Anna was pleased to see this curiosity from the boys; clearly America had not yet jaded them to the beauty and sheer difference of the rest of the world.

Their guides took them in the biggest building, the Government House. It was darker inside, and with their sunglasses on, seemed at first black. By the time they had taken off sunglasses and adjusted to the relative gloom, they found Joe had run off ahead of them. The room displayed the post-and-beam construction characteristic of Himalayan buildings, and the rough-hewn posts in each corner were hung with demon masks.

They followed Joe over to one of these collections. Each mask grimaced rotundly, almost exploding with fury, pain, repugnance. Stacked vertically they looked like a totem pole from a tribe of utter maniacs. Joe was embracing the bottom of the pole.

“Oooh! Oooh! Big— big— big—”

Big what, he could not say. His mouth hung open, his eyes bugged out; they could have molded a new mask portraying astonishment directly from his face.

Frank laughed. “These are his kind of people.”

“He probably thinks it’s a stack of mirrors,” Charlie said.

“Quit it,” Anna said. “Don’t be mean.”

Charlie and Nick leaned their faces in to take photos of themselves on each side of Joe, eyes bugged, tongues thrust out and down. Hopefully they were not offending their hosts. But looking around Anna saw that the guides were smiling.

“They’re masks that hide your face but show your insides,” Charlie said. “This is what we’re all really like inside.”

“No,” Anna said.

“Oh come on. In your feelings? In your dreams?”

“I certainly hope not. Besides, where’s the good feelings?”

She had been thinking of perhaps the curiosity mask, or the striving-for-accuracy mask, but Charlie gave her a Groucho look and indicated with his eyebrows the paintings on the beams between wall and ceiling, which included any number of improbably entwined couples. Frank was frankly checking them out, nodding as if they confirmed some sociobiological insight only he could formulate, bonobo Buddhism or something like that. Anna snorted, pretty sure that the tantrically horny painters had to have been fantasizing elements of female flexibility, among other endowments. Maybe six arms made it easier to position oneself. Or perhaps there was no gravity in nirvana; which would also explain all the perfectly round tits. She wondered what Joe would make of those, being still a breast man of the first order. But for now he remained too fixated on the demon masks to notice them.

Then they were joined by more scientists from the Khembalung Institute for Higher Studies. There were introductions all around, and Anna shook hands, pleased to see all her correspondents at last, just as shockingly real and vivid as the demon masks. Frank joined them, and for a while they chatted about NSF and their various collaborations. Then Frank and Anna and Nick left Charlie and Joe in Government House, and followed their new hosts through rooms and across a courtyard to the Institute itself, where the new labs that NSF had helped to fund and build were still under construction. Outside one of the rooms was a statue of the Buddha, standing with one hand raised before him palm outward, in a gesture like a traffic cop saying stop.

“I’ve never seen him look like that.”

“This is, what say, the Adamantine Buddha,” one of her pen pals said. “The Buddha is represented in a number of different ways. He is not always meditating or laughing. When there is bad going on, the Buddha is as obliged to stop it as anyone else who sees it. And, you know, since bad things happen fairly regularly, there has always been a figure to represent the Buddha’s response.”

Nick said, “He looks like a policeman.”

Their guide nodded. “Police Inspector Sakyamuni. Who insists that we all must resist the three poisons of the mind: fear, greed, and anger.”

“So true,” Anna said. Frank was nodding also, lost in his thoughts.

“This aspect of Buddha-nature is also the one represented in the statues on the dike, of course.”

“Can we go on it?” Frank and Nick asked together.

“Of course. We’re very near it here.”

They finished their tour and joined the rest of their group outside, on a lawn surrounded on three sides by buildings, on the fourth, to the east, by the inner wall of the dike. The wall was a tilted lawn in this area, bisected by a set of broad stone steps leading to its top. Frank and Anna and Nick followed some of their guides up these steps; Charlie and Joe appeared below, and Joe began to run around on the grass.

On top they emerged into a stiff onshore wind. Out to sea lay a white fleet of tall clouds. A big statue of the Adamantine Buddha faced seaward, hand outstretched. From beside him they had a good view of both sea and land, and Anna felt herself lurch a little. “Wow,” Nick said.

It was as it had appeared from the plane during their approach: the land inside the dike was slightly lower than the ocean surrounding it. It was no illusion; their eyesight and inner ear confirmed it.

“Holland is like this in some places,” Frank said to Anna as they followed Nick and the guides. “Have you ever seen the dikes?”

“No.”

“Some of the polders there are clearly lower than the North Sea. You can walk the dikes, and it’s the strangest sight.”

“So it’s true?” Anna asked, waving at Khembalung. “I mean—it looks like it must be.”

One of their guides turned and said, “Unfortunately it is true. When the land is drained, there is a resulting subsidence. Dry land is heavier, and sinks, and then the water wicks up into it. We have gone through cycle after cycle.”

Anna shivered despite the hot wind. She felt faintly queasy and off balance.

“Try looking only one way at a time.”

Anna tried, setting her back to the island. Under a pastel blue, clouds flew in from the southwest. The sea bounced to the blue horizon, waves with white-caps rolling in. Such a big world. Their guides pointed at the clouds, exclaiming that they looked like the beginning of the monsoon; perhaps the drought would end at last!

They walked along the dike, which was clearly old. A heavy bar mesh at the waterline had rusted away, so that the boulders held in by the mesh were slumping, and in places had fallen. Their guides told them that dike maintenance was done with human labor and the little machinery they had, but that there were structural repairs needed that they could not afford, as they could see. Frank jumped onto the waist-high outer wall, setting a bad example for Nick, who immediately followed it.

Sucandra and Padma came up the broad stone staircase, and when they saw Frank and Nick on the retaining wall they called to them. “Hello! Look, the monsoon may be coming!”

They topped the wall and fell in with them. “We wanted to show you the mandala. Hello, Mingma, you have met our visitors, we see.”

Back down on the dusty grass Charlie and Joe had been joined by Rudra, Drepung, and a group of Khembali youth who were creating a mandala on a giant wooden disk that lay on the lawn. “Let’s go down and see,” Sucandra suggested, and they walked down the steps and out of the brunt of the wind. It certainly felt humid enough to rain.

The biggest sand mandalas took about a week to complete, Mingma told them. Long brass funnels were held by the artists just an inch or so over the pattern, and when the funnels were rubbed with sticks, thin lines of colored sand fell from them. The colorists worked on their knees, scarcely breathing, rubbing the funnels rhythmically, gently, their faces down near the ground to watch the emerging line of sand; then with a quick tilt of the funnels they would stop the flow and sit back and turn to the others, to crack a joke or laugh at someone else’s.

When the design was completely colored in, there would be a ceremony to celebrate the various meanings it held, and then it would be carried to the long shallow reflecting pool in front of Government House, and tipped into the water.

“A real launch party,” Charlie noted.

“It signifies the impermanence of all things.”

To Anna that seemed like a waste of the art. She did not like the impermanence of all things, and felt there was already enough in the world to remind her of it. She liked to think that human efforts were cumulative, that something in every effort was preserved and added to the whole. Perhaps in this case that would be the mandala’s pattern, which would remain in their minds. Or maybe this art was a performance rather than an object. Maybe. What she wanted out of art was something that lasted. If their art did not have that, it seemed like a waste of effort to her.

Over on the other side of the mandala, Joe and Rudra were standing before a group of monks, and Rudra was chanting intently in his deep gravelly voice, a happy gleam in his eye. Those around him repeated the last word of every sentence, in a kind of shout or singing. Joe stamped his foot in time, crying “No!” in unison with the rest of them. He hadn’t even noticed Anna was there.

Then suddenly he took off directly toward the sand mandala, fists clenched and swinging like a miniaturized John Wayne. Anna cried out “Joe!” but he did not hear her. The Khembalis actually made way for him, some of them with arms outstretched as if to create a better corridor. “Joe!” she cried again more sharply. “Joe! Stop!” He hesitated for a second, at the edge of the circle of brilliant color, then walked out onto it.

“JOE!”

No one moved. Joe stood peacefully at the center of the mandala, looking around.

Anna rushed down the steps to the edge of the circle. Joe’s footprints had blurred some lines, and grains of colored sand were now out of place, scattered brilliantly in the wrong fields. Joe was looking very pleased with himself, surveying the pattern under his feet, a pattern made of colors almost precisely the same as the colors of his building blocks at home, only more vibrant. He spotted Rudra, and thrust an arm out to wave at him. “Ba!” he declared.

“Baaaa,” Rudra replied, putting his hands together and bowing.

Joe held his pose, not unlike that of the Adamantine Buddhas, with a kind of Napoleonic grandeur. Charlie, standing now beside Anna, shook his head. “Ya big old hambone,” he muttered.

Joe dropped his arm, made a gesture at all the people watching him. A few drops of rain spattered down out of the low clouds bowling in from sea, and the Khembalis oohed and ahhed as they felt it and looked up.

Joe took off again, this time in the direction of the reflecting pool. Anna rushed around the circle of people to cut him off, but she was too late; he walked right into the shallows. “Joe!” she called out, to no effect. Joe turned and confronted the crowd that had followed him, standing knee-deep in the water. It was sprinkling lightly but steadily now, the rain warm on Anna’s face, and all the Khembalis were smiling. Enough colored sand had stuck to Joe’s feet that vermillion and yellow blooms spread in the water around him.

“Rgyal ba,” Rudra declared, and the crowded repeated it. Then: “Ce ba drin dran-pa!”

“What is he saying?” Anna asked Drepung, who now stood beside her, as if to support her if she fainted, or perhaps to stop her if she started in after Joe. Charlie stood on her other side.

“All hail,” Drepung said. He looked older to Anna, his round face and little mouth finally at home. She had seen that he was clearly a well-known and popular figure here.

Joe stood in the shallows regarding the crowd. He was happy. The Khembalis were indulging him, enjoying him. The warm rain fell on them like a balm. Suddenly Anna felt happy; her little tiger saw that he was among friends, somehow, and at last he stood in the world content, relaxed, even serene. She had never seen him look like this. She had wanted so much for him to feel something like this.

Charlie, on the other hand, felt his stomach go tense at the sight of Joe in the pool. All his worries were being confirmed. He took a deep breath, thinking Nothing has changed, you knew this already—they’re thinking he’s one of their tulkus. That doesn’t mean that it’s true.

He couldn’t imagine what Anna was making of all this.

Standing beside each other, the two of them both felt the discrepancy in their reactions. And they sensed as well that their characteristic moods or responses were here reversed, Anna pleased by a Joe anomaly, Charlie worried.

Uneasily they glanced at each other, both thinking This is backwards, what’s going on?

“Big rain!” Joe exclaimed, looking up, and the crowd sighed appreciatively.

That night the visitors collapsed on the beds in their rooms, even Joe, and slept from the early evening through the night and well into the next morning. It had rained the whole time, and when they went back out after breakfast they found the island transformed; everything was drenched, with standing water everywhere. The Khembalis were very happy to see it, however, so they split up into groups and took off in the rain as planned. Joe and Nick were first taken to the school to see classes and playground games. Everywhere he went Joe was made much of, and he was left free to commune with every demon mask they passed, directing diatribes in his private language at some of them. In the afternoon Nick left his group and joined Anna at the Institute, where she was talking to her pen pals and the other scientists there. Charlie spent his time in Government House, talking to officials brought to him by Padma.

Frank was gone; they didn’t know how he was spending his time, although once in passing Anna saw him in conversation with Sucandra and some of the local monks. Later she saw him on the dike, walking the berm path with Rudra Cakrin. Judging from his talk at dinner, he had also spent time discussing agriculture out in the fields. But mostly he seemed to Anna like a religious pilgrim, eager for instruction and enlightenment, absorbed, distant, relaxed; very unlike his manner back in Washington.

Next afternoon they visited the zoo, located in a big park at the northwest quadrant of the island. Many of the animals and birds of the Sundarbans were represented. The elephants had a large enclosure, but the largest enclosure of all was the tigers’. Many of the big cats had been swept to sea by one flood or another, and rescued by Khembali patrol boats. Now they lived in an enclosure thick with stands of elephant grass and saal trees, fronted by a big pond cut by a curving glass retaining wall, so that when the tigers went swimming they could be seen underwater. Their abrupt foursquare dives and subsequent splayed strokes turned feline grace unexpectedly aquatic, and underwater their fur streamed like seaweed. “Tiger! Tiger! Big big tiger!”

At the end of that wet day they sat in a big hall and ate a meal anchored by curried rice. Nick was served a special order of plain rice, arranged by Drepung, but Joe was fine with the curry. Or so it seemed during the meal; but that night in their room he was fractious, and then, after a long nursing session, wide awake. Jet lag, perhaps. The monsoon rains were coming down hard, the drumming of it on the roof quite loud. Joe began to complain. Anna was asleep on her feet, but Charlie was out entirely, so she had to zombie on, hour after hour, mumbling replies to Joe’s cheerful jabberwocking. She was on the verge of a collapse when a knock came at the door, and Frank looked in.

“I can’t sleep, and I could hear you were up with Joe. I wondered if you wanted me to play with him for a while.”

“Oh God bless you,” she cried. “I was just about to melt.” She fell on the couch and shut her sandy eyes. For a while her brain continued to turn, as her body dove into sleep and dragged her consciousness down with it.

“Nick sleeping. Da sleeping. Mama sleeping.”

“That’s right.”

“Wanna play?”

“Sure. What you got here, trains? What about some airplanes, shouldn’t you have some airplanes?”

“Got planes.”

“Good. Let’s fly, let’s fly and fly.”

“Fly!”

“Hey, those are your tigers! Well, that’s okay. Flying tigers are just right for here. Watch out, here he comes!”

“Tiger fly!”

Anna stitched the meandering border between sleep and dreams, in and out, up and down. Frank and Joe passed toys back and forth.

In the hour before dawn a hard knock battered their door, throwing Anna convulsively to her feet. She had been dreaming of the tigers’ fluid swimming, up in the sky—

It was Drepung, looking agitated. “I’m sorry to disturb you, my friends, but a decision has been made that we must all evacuate the island.”

This woke them all, even Charlie who was usually so slow to rouse. Frank turned on all the lights, and they packed their bags while Drepung explained the situation.

“The monsoon has returned, as you have seen,” he said. “This is a good thing, but unfortunately it has come at a time of especially high tides, and together with the storm surge, and the low air pressure, sea level is extremely high.” He helped the comatose Nick into a shirt. “It’s already higher on the dikes than is judged fully safe, higher than we have seen for many years, and some weaknesses in it are being exposed. And now we have been informed that the monsoon or something else has caused the breaking of ice dams in the drainage of the Brahmaputra.” He looked at Charlie: “These big glacial lakes are a result of global warming. The Himalayan glaciers are melting fast, and now lots of ice dams that create lakes behind them are giving way under these monsoon rains, adding greatly to the run-off. The Brahmaputra is already overflowing, and much of Bangladesh is faced with flooding. They called with the alarm from Dhaka just a short while ago.” He checked his watch. “Just an hour ago, good. It goes fast. The surge of high water will arrive soon, and we are already at our limit. And as you have seen, the island is lower than the sea even at the best of times. This is a problem with using dikes for protection. If the dike fails, the result can be severe. So we must leave the island.”

“How?” Anna exclaimed.

“Don’t worry, we have ferries at the dock enough for all. Always docked here for this very purpose, because the danger is ever-present. We have used them before, when the rivers flood or there are high tides. Any of them can flood us. The island is just too low, and unfortunately, getting lower.”

“And sea level is getting higher,” Charlie said. “I heard from a friend in Antarctica that a piece of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet came off a few days ago. Every time that happens sea level rises by whatever extra amount of water the ice displaces.”

“Interesting,” Drepung said. “Perhaps that explains why we are already at the safety level on the dike.”

“How much time do we have?” Anna said.

“Two or three hours. This is more than enough time for us.” He sighed nevertheless. “We prefer that our guests leave by helicopter in a situation like this, but to tell the truth the helicopter went to Calcutta last night, to bring out the ABC officials to meet you. So now it appears you should join us on the ferries.”

“How many people live here again?” Charlie asked as he threw their bathroom bags into his backpack.

“Twelve thousand.”

“Wow.”

“Yes. It is a big operation, but all will be well.”

“What about the zoo animals?” Nick asked. By now their bags were packed, and Nick was dressed and looking wide awake.

“We have a boat for them too. It’s a difficult procedure, but there is a team assigned to it. People with circus experience. They call their act, ‘Noah Goes Fast.’ How about you, are you ready?”

They were ready. Joe had watched all the action with a curious eye; now he said, “Da? Go?”

“That’s right big guy. We’re off on another trip.”

Outside it was raining harder than ever, the cloud cover somewhat broken and flying north on a strong wind. They hustled into a van and joined a little traffic jam on the island’s main road. All the crowded vans turned north toward the dock. Joe sat in Anna’s lap looking out the window, saying “Ba? Ba?”

Charlie was on his phone. “Hey Wade!” he said, and Anna bent her head to try and catch what he was saying. “How big was that berg? … No kidding. Have they calculated the displacement yet? … Oh okay. Yeah, not that much, but we’ve got a situation here, a monsoon flood and a full-moon tide… Shit. Okay.”

He clicked off.

“What?” Anna said.

“Wade says the piece of the ice sheet that came off probably displaced enough water to raise sea level by a centimeter or two.”

“God that must be a big iceberg,” Anna said. “Think of sea level going up a centimeter everywhere around the world.”

“Yes. Although apparently it’s only a little piece of the total ice sheet. And once it starts coming apart there’s no telling how fast it might go.”

“My lord.”

They sat bracketing the boys. Nick was wide-eyed, but appeared too surprised by all the activity to formulate his usual barrage of questions. Their van joined the line out to the southern stretch of the dike. Drepung leaned forward from his seat to show them the screen of his cell phone, which now displayed a tiny image of the upper end of the Bay of Bengal and the lower delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra. This satellite photo had rendered altimetry data in false coloration to show river and sea level departures from the norm, with the brilliant spectral band ranging from the cool blues and greens of normality to the angry yellows, oranges, and reds of high water. Now the right side of the delta ran red, the left side orange and then yellow. And the whole Bay of Bengal was light orange already.

Drepung put a fingertip to the screen, looking very serious. “See that little blue dot there? That’s us. We are low. Orange all around us. That means a couple meters higher than normal.”

Charlie said, “That’s not so bad, is it?”

“The dike is maxed out. They’re saying now that they don’t think it will be able to handle this flood surge.” He leaned back to take a call on his cell phone. Then: “Now they tell me that the helicopter is on its way, and will be here before the ferries can be loaded. We would very much appreciate it if you would take the helicopter back to Calcutta.”

“We don’t want to take space you might need,” Charlie said.

“No, that’s just it. It will be easier for us if you are away. No break in the routine at the docks.”

Their van turned around and drove back toward town. Now they were going against the traffic, and could speed south and then west out the road to the airport. Once there they circled around the terminal, directly out onto the wet tarmac near the helo’s landing site.

“Another twenty minutes,” Drepung said. Joe began to wail, and they let him down to run around. From time to time they looked at Drepung’s handheld and got the image of the delta, in real time but false color. The coming of day made it harder to see, but the whole delta was now orange, and the blue areas denoting islands were distinctly smaller. “The Sundarbans,” Drepung said, shaking his head. “They are really meant to be amphibious.”

Then a helicopter thwacked out of the dawn sky. “Good,” Drepung said, and led them off the concrete pad, onto a flat field next to it. They watched the big helicopter drop down through the clouds in a huge noise and wind of its own making, settling down on its pad like an oversized dragonfly. Joe howled at the sight. Charlie picked him up and felt the child clutch at him. They waited to be signaled over to the helo. Its blades continued to rotate, chopping the air at a speed allowing them to make out a speed of rotation, whether real or not they could not say.

“Down!” Joe shouted in Charlie’s ear. “Down! Down! Down! Down!”

“Let him down for a second,” Anna said. “There’s time, isn’t there?”

Drepung was still at their side. “Yes, there’s time.”

Men in dark green uniforms were getting off the helicopter. Charlie put Joe down on the ground. Immediately Joe struck out for the helo, and Charlie followed, intent on stopping him. He saw that Joe’s feet had sunk into what must have been very soft ground; and water was quickly seeping into his prints. Charlie picked him up from behind, ignored his wails as he returned to the others. He looked back; Joe’s watery prints caught little chips of the dawn light, looking like silver coins.

Then it was time to board. Joe insisted on walking himself, kicking furiously when held by either Charlie or Anna, shrieking “Down let down let down!” So they let him down and held him hard by the hands and walked forward, Nick on the other side of Anna, all ducking instinctively under the high but drooping blades that guillotined the air so noisily overhead.

In the helicopter it was a bit quieter. There were a few people already in the short rows of seats, and in the next half hour they were joined by others, about half of them Westerners, the rest perhaps Indians, including a bevy of wide-eyed schoolgirls. The Quiblers and Frank greeted each in turn, and the schoolgirls gathered to dote on Joe in their musical English. He hid his head from them, clung hard to Anna. Charlie looked out a little window beside them, set low so that right now he could see little more than the puddles on the concrete.

The noise of the engines got louder and up they lifted, tilting back and then forward, a strange sensation for anyone used to airplanes.

Out the lower window they caught a glimpse of the dike when they were just above its height, and there was the sea right there beyond it, lipping at the very top of the berm. The uncanny sight remained burned in their minds as the helo banked and they lost the view.

They made a rising turn over the island, and the view came back and went away, came back and went away. Joe leaned from Anna’s arms to the window, trying to see better. Nick was looking out the same window from the seat behind. The sea was a dark brown, and on the island everything was soaked, gray-green fields lined with standing water—trees, rooftops, the plaza with the reflecting pool, all deep in shadow; then the ocean again, clearly as high as the dike. “There’s where we were staying!” Nick called, pointing.

They banked in a gyre that cut through the bottom layers of the clouds. Dark, light, rain, clear, they flew from one state to the next. Rain skittered across the outside of the glass in sudden streaming deltas. They saw the ferries at the dock on the north side of the island; they were casting off, and Drepung shouted something up to the pilots. He gave the Quiblers a thumbs-up. Then the helo continued its curve, and they saw other outer islands of the Sundarban archipelago, many of them submerged by the flood already and no more than shallow reefs. The channels between these were a pale brown, flecked with dirty white.

They curved back over Khembalung and saw that the dike had been breached on its southwest curve, where it faced the battering of the storm surf. Brown water, heavily flecked with foam, poured whitely down onto the fields below the break, in its rush clearly ripping the gap in the dike wider. Soon Khembalung would look like all the other Sundarbans.

Now Joe crawled onto Charlie’s lap and took a death grip on Charlie’s neck, moaning or keening, it was hard to hear in all the racket, but somehow the sound of it cut through everything else. Charlie forced the hands on his neck to loosen their grip. “It’s okay!” he said loudly to the boy. “It’ll be okay! They’re all okay! They’re on the boats. Big boats! The people were on the boats! All the people were on the boats”

“Da, da, da,” Joe moaned, or maybe it was “Na, da, na.” He put a hand on the window.

“Oh my God,” Charlie said.

Over Joe’s head he could see again the gap where the ocean was pouring in; it was already much wider than before. It looked like the whole southwest curve would go. Already most of the interior fields were sheeted with foamy water.

Ahead of them the pilot and copilot were shouting into their headsets. The helo tilted, spiraled higher. Clouds interrupted their view below. A loud buffeted ascent, then they caught sight of Khembalung again, from higher than before; through a break in the clouds it looked like a shallow green bowl, submerged in brown water until only an arc of the bowl’s rim remained in air.

Charlie said, “Don’t, Joe! I have to breathe.”

“Ah gone! Ah gone!”

Abruptly the helicopter tilted away, and all they could see outside the window was cloud. The Sundarbans were gone, all their mangrove swamps drowned, all their tigers swimming. The helo flew off like a blown leaf. Joe buried his face in Charlie’s chest and sobbed.