Forty Signs of Rain sitc-1

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  And all the while the wind howled over them, through them, against them. It was basically a warm wind, perhaps sixty or even sixty-five degrees. Leo found it impossible to judge its speed. Even though the cliffs in this area were low compared to those at Torrey Pines—about eighty feet tall rather than three hundred and fifty—that was still enough and more to block the terrific onshore flow and cause the wind to shoot up the cliffs and over them, so that a bit back from the edge it could be almost still, while right at the edge a blasting updraft was spiked by frequent gusts, like uppercuts from an invisible fist. Leo felt as if he could have leaned out over the edge and put out his arms and be held there at an angle—even jump and float down. Young windsurfers would probably be trying it soon, or surfers with their wetsuits altered to make them something like flying squirrels. Not that they would want to be in the water now. The sheer height of the whitewater surge against the cliffside was hard to believe, truly startling; bursts of spray regularly shot up into the wind and were whirled inland onto the already-drenched houses and people.

  Leo got his wheelbarrow to the end of the plank road, and let a gang of people grasp his handles with him and help him tilt the stone out at the right place. After that he got out of the way and stood for a moment, watching people work. Restricted access to some of the weakest parts of the cliff meant that this was going to take days. Right now the rocks simply disappeared into the waves. No visible result whatsoever. “It’s like dropping rocks in the ocean,” he said to no one. The noise of the wind was terrific, a constant howl, like jets warming up for takeoff, interrupted by frequent invisible whacks on the ear. He could talk to himself without fear of being overheard, and did: a running narration of his day. His eyes watered in the wind, but that same wind tore the tears away and cleared his vision again and again.

  This was purely a physical reaction to the gale; he was basically very happy to be there. Happy to have the distraction of the storm. A public disaster, a natural world event; it put everyone in the same boat, somehow. In a way it was even inspiring—not just the human response, but the storm itself. Wind as spirit. It felt uplifting. As if the wind had carried him off and out of his life.

  Certainly it put things in a very different perspective. Losing a job, so what? How did that signify, really? The world was so vast and powerful. They were tiny things in it, like fleas, their problems the tiniest of flea perturbations.

  So he returned to the dump truck and took another rock, and then focused on balancing the broken-edged thing at the front end of the wheelbarrow: turning it, keeping it on the flexing line of planks, shouldering into the blasts. Tipping a rock into the sea. Wonderful, really.

  He was running the empty wheelbarrow back to the street when he saw Marta and Brian, getting out of Marta’s truck parked down at the end of the street. “Hey!” This was a nice surprise—they were not a couple, or even friends outside the lab, as far as Leo knew, and he had feared that with the lab shut down he would never see either of them again.

  “Marta!” he bellowed happily. “Bri-man!”

  “LEO!”

  They were glad to see him. Marta ran up and gave him a hug. Brian did the same.

  “How’s it going?” “How’s it going?”

  They were jacked up by the storm and the chance to do something. No doubt it had been a long couple of weeks for them too, no work to go to, nothing to do. Well, they would have been out in the surf, or otherwise active. But here they were now, and Leo was glad.

  Quickly they all got into the flow of the work, trundling rocks out to the cliff. Once Leo found himself following Marta down the plank line, and he watched her broad bunched shoulders and soaking black curls with a sudden blaze of friendship and admiration. She was a surfer gal, slim hips, broad shoulders, raising her head at a blast of the wind to howl back at it. Hooting with glee. He was going to miss her. Brian too. It had been good of them to come by like this; but the nature of things was such that they would surely find other work, and then they would drift apart. It never lasted with old work colleagues, the bond just wasn’t strong enough. Work was always a matter of showing up and then enjoying the people who had been hired to work there too. Not only their banter, but also the way they did the work, the experiments they made together. They had been a good lab.

  The Army guys were waving them back from the edge of the cliff. It had been a lawn and now it was all torn up, and there was a guy there crouching over a big metal box, USGS on his soaking windbreaker. Brian shouted in their ears: they had found a fracture in the sandstone parallel to the cliff’s edge here, and apparently someone had felt the ground slump a little, and the USGS guy’s instrumentation was indicating movement. It was going to go. Everyone dumped their rocks where they were and hustled the empty wheelbarrows back to Neptune.

  Just in time. With a short dull roar and whump that almost could have been the sound of more wind and surf—the impact of a really big wave—the cliff edge slumped. Then where it had been, they were looking through space at the gray sea hundreds of yards offshore. The cliff top was fifteen feet closer to them.

  Very spooky. The crowd let out a collective shout that was audible above the wind. Leo and Brian and Marta drifted forward with the rest, to catch a glimpse of the dirty rage of water below. The break extended about a hundred yards to the south, maybe fifty to the north. A modest loss in the overall scheme of things, but this was the way it was happening, one little break at a time, all up and down this stretch of coast. The USGS guy had told them that there was a whole series of faults in the sandstone here, all parallel to the cliff, so that it was likely to flake off piece by piece as the waves gouged away support from below. That was how A through C Streets had gone in a single night. It could happen all the way inland to the coast highway, he said.

  Amazing. Leo could only hope that Roxanne’s mother’s house had been built on one of the more solid sections of the bluff. It had always seemed that way when he descended the nearby staircase and checked it out; it stood over a kind of buttress of stone. But as he watched the ocean flail, and felt the wind strike them, there was no reason to be sure any section would hold. A whole neighborhood could go. And all up and down the coast they had built close to the edge, so it would be much the same in many other places.

  No house had gone over in the slump they had just witnessed, but one at the southern end of it had lost parts of its west wall—been torn open to the wind. Everyone stood around staring, pointing, shouting unheard in the roar of wind. Milling about, running hither and thither, trying to get a view.

  There was nothing else to be done at this point. The end of their plank road was gone along with everything else. The Army and county guys were getting out sawhorses and rolls of orange plastic stripping; they were going to cordon off this section of the street, evacuate it, and shift the work efforts to safer platforms.

  “Wow,” Leo said to the storm, feeling the word ripped out of his mouth and flung to the east. “My Lord, what a wind.” He shouted to Marta: “We were standing right out there!”

  “Gone!” Marta howled. “That baby is gone! It’s as gone as Torrey Pines Generique!”

  Brian and Leo shouted their agreement. Into the sea with the damned place!

  They retreated to the lee of Marta’s little Toyota pickup, sat on the curb behind its slight protection and drank some espressos she had in the cab, already cold in paper cups with plastic tops.

  “There’ll be more work,” Leo told them.

  “That’s for sure.” But they meant boulder work. “I heard the coast highway is cut just south of Cardiff,” Brian said. “San Elijo Lagoon is completely full, and now the surf is coming up the river mouth. Restaurant Row is totally gone. The overpass fell in and then the water started ripping both ways at the roadbed.”

  “Wow!”

  “It’s going to be a mess. I bet that will happen at the Torrey Pines river mouth too.”

  “All the big lagoons.”

  “Maybe, yeah.”

&
nbsp; They sipped their espressos.

  “It’s good to see you guys!” Leo said. “Thanks for coming by.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the worst part of this whole thing,” Leo said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Too bad they didn’t hang on to us—they’re putting all their eggs in one basket now.”

  Marta and Brian regarded Leo. He wondered which part of what he had just said they disagreed with. Now that they weren’t working for him, he had no right to grill them about it, or about anything else. On the other hand there was no reason to hold back either.

  “What?”

  “I just got hired by Small Delivery Systems,” Marta said, almost shouting to be heard over the noise. She glanced at Leo uncomfortably. “Eleanor Dufours is working for them now, and she hired me. They want us to work on that algae stuff we’ve been doing.”

  “Oh I see! Well good! Good for you.”

  “Yeah, well. Atlanta.”

  There was a whistle from the Army guys. A whole gang of Leucadians were trooping behind them down Neptune, south to another dump truck that had just arrived. There was more to be done.

  Leo and Marta and Brian followed, went back to work. Some people left, others arrived. Lots of people were documenting events on video cameras and digital cameras. As the day wore on, the volunteers were glad to take heavy-duty work gloves from the Army guys to protect their palms from further blistering.

  About two that afternoon the three of them decided to call it quits. Their palms were trashed. Leo’s thighs and lower back were getting shaky, and he was hungry. The cliff work would go on, and there would be no shortage of volunteers while the storm lasted. The need was evident, and besides it was fun to be out in the blast, doing something. Working made it seem like a practical contribution to be out there, although many would have been out to watch in any case.

  The three of them stood on a point just north of Swami’s, leaning into the storm and marveling at the spectacle. Marta was bouncing a little in place, stuffed with energy still, totally fired up; she seemed both exhilarated and furious, and shouted at the biggest waves when they struck the stubborn little cliff at Pipes. “Wow! Look at that. Outside, outside!” She was soaking wet, as they all were, the rain plastering her curls to her head, the wind plastering her shirt to her torso; she looked like the winner of some kind of extreme-sport wet T-shirt contest, her breasts and belly button and ribs and collarbones and abs all perfectly delineated under the thin wet cloth. She was a power, a San Diego surf goddess, and good for her that she had gotten hired by Small Delivery Systems. Again Leo felt a glow for this wild young colleague of his.

  “This is so great,” he shouted. “I’d rather do this than work in the lab!”

  Brian laughed. “They don’t pay you for this, Leo.”

  “Ah hey. Fuck that. This is still better.” And he howled at the storm.

  Then Brian and Marta gave him hugs; they were taking off.

  “Let’s try to stay in touch you guys,” Leo said sentimentally. “Let’s really do it. Who knows, we may all end up working together again someday anyway.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I’ll probably be available,” Brian said.

  Marta shrugged, looking away. “We either will be or we won’t.”

  Then they were off. Leo waved at Marta’s receding truck. A sudden pang—would he ever see them again? The reflection of the truck’s taillights smeared in two red lines over the street’s wet asphalt. Blinking right turn signal—then they were gone.

  X

  Broader Impacts

  It takes no great skill to decode the world system today. A tiny percentage of the population is immensely wealthy, some are well off, a lot are just getting by, a lot more are suffering. We call it capitalism, but within it lies buried residual patterns of feudalism and older hierarchies, basic injustices framing the way we organize ourselves. Everybody lives in an imaginary relationship to this real situation; and that is our world. We walk with scales on our eyes, and only see what we think.

  And all the while on a sidewalk over the abyss. There are islands of time when things seem stable. Nothing much happens but the rounds of the week. Later the islands break apart. When enough time has passed, no one now alive will still be here; everyone will be different. Then it will be the stories that will link the generations, history and DNA, long chains of the simplest bits—guanine, adenine, cytosine, thymine—love, hope, fear, selfishness—all recombining again and again, until a miracle happens

  and the organism springs forth!

  Charlie, awakened by the sound of a loud alarm, leapt to his feet and stood next to his bed, hands thrown out like a nineteenth-century boxer.

  “What?” he shouted at the loud noise.

  It was not an alarm. It was Joe in the room, wailing. He stared at his father amazed. “Ba.”

  “Jesus, Joe.” The itchiness began to burn across Charlie’s chest and arms. He had tossed and turned in misery most of the night, as he had every night since encountering the poison ivy. He had probably fallen asleep only an hour or two before. “What time is it. Joe, it’s not even seven! Don’t yell like that. All you have to do is tap me on the shoulder if I’m asleep, and say, ‘Good morning Dad, can you warm up a bottle for me?’”

  Joe approached and tapped his leg, staring peacefully at him. “Mo Da. Wa ba.”

  “Wow Joe. Really good! Say, I’ll get your bottle warmed up right away! Very good! Hey listen, have you pooped in your diaper yet? You might want to pull it down and sit on your own toilet in the bathroom like a big boy, poop like Nick and then come on down to the kitchen and your bottle will be ready. Doesn’t that sound good?”

  “Ga Da.” Joe trundled off toward the bathroom.

  Charlie, amazed, padded after Joe and descended the stairs as gently as he could, hoping not to stimulate his itches. In the kitchen the air was delightfully cool and silky. Nick was there reading a book. Without looking up he said, “I want to go down to the park and play.”

  “I thought you had homework to do.”

  “Well, sort of. But I want to play.”

  “Why don’t you do your homework first and then play, that way when you play you’ll be able to really enjoy it.”

  Nick cocked his head. “That’s true. Okay, I’ll go do my homework first.” He slipped out, book under his arm.

  “Oh, and take your shoes up to your room while you’re on your way.”

  “Sure Dad.”

  Charlie stared at his reflection in the side of the stove hood. His eyes were round.

  “Hmm,” he said. He got Joe’s bottle in its pot, stuck an earphone in his left ear. “Phone, give me Phil… Hello, Phil, look I wanted to catch you while the thought was fresh, I was thinking that if only we tried to introduce the Chinese aerosols bill again, then we could catch the whole air problem at a kind of fulcrum point and either start a process that would finish with the coal plants here on the East Coast, or else it would serve as a stalking horse, see what I mean?”

  “So you’re saying we go after the Chinese again?”

  “Well yeah, but as part of your whole package of efforts.”

  “And then it either works or it doesn’t work, but gives us some leverage we can use elsewhere? Hmm, good idea Charlie, I’d forgotten that bill, but it was a good one. I’ll give that a try. Call Roy and tell him to get it ready.”

  “Sure Phil, consider it done.”

  Charlie took the bottle out of the pot and dried it. Joe appeared in the door, naked, holding up his diaper for Charlie’s inspection.

  “Wow Joe, very good! You pooped in your toilet? Very, very good, here’s your bottle all ready, what a perfect kind of Pavlovian reward.”

  Joe snatched the bottle from Charlie’s hand and waddled off, a length of toilet paper trailing behind him, one end stuck between the halves of his butt.

  Holy shit, Charlie thought. So to speak.

  He called up Roy and told him Phil had authorize
d the reintroduction of the Chinese bill. Roy was incredulous. “What do you mean, we went down big-time on that, it was a joke then and it would be worse now!”

  “No not so, it lost bad but that was good, we got lots of credit for it that we deployed elsewhere, and it’ll happen the same way when we do it again because it’s right, Roy, we have right on our side on this.”

  “Yes of course obviously that’s not the point—”

  “Not the point, have we gotten so jaded that being right is no longer relevant?”

  “No of course not, but that’s not the point either, it’s like playing a chess game, each move is just a move in the larger game, you know?”

  “Yes I do know because that’s my analogy, but that’s my point, this is a good move, this checks them, they have to give up a queen to stop from being checkmated.”

  “You really think it’s that much leverage? Why?”

  “Because Winston has such ties to Chinese industry, and he can’t defend that very well to his hard-core constituency, Christian realpolitik isn’t really a supercoherent philosophy and so it’s a vulnerability he has don’t you see?”

  “Well yeah, of course. You said Phil okayed it already?”