Fifty Degrees Below sitc-2

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “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 pote
ntial 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 b
e 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.