Fifty Degrees Below sitc-2

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  His Acheulian hand axe came in the mail at work, and he pulled it out of its bubble wrap and held it up to the light. Instantly it was his favorite rock. It had a lovely weight, and fitted his hand perfectly; it was the classic Acheulian oval, with a sharp tip at its smaller end. Chipped on both sides very expertly, so that it seemed as much a work of sculpture as a tool, a little Andy Goldsworthy sculpture; a petroglyph all by itself, speaking in its heft a whole world. The people who made it. Gray quartzite, slightly translucent, the chipped faces almost as smoothed by patination during their four hundred thousand years of exposure as the browned curve of original core. It was beautiful.

  He took it to the park and pulled it from his daypack to show to Spencer and Robin and Robert the next time they ran, and they spontaneously fell to their knees to honor it, crying out wordlessly, like the gibbons. “Ahh! Ahh! Oh my God. Oh God, here it is.” Robin salaamed to it, Spencer inspected every chip and curve, kissing it from time to time. “Look how perfect it is,” he said.

  “Look,” Robin said when he held it, “it’s shaped for a left-hander, see? It fits a lot better when you hold it in your left hand.” Robin was left-handed. “Do you think maybe Homo erectus were all left-handed?” he went on. “Like polar bears? Polar bears are all left-handed, did you know that?”

  “Only because you’ve told us a thousand times,” Spencer said, taking it from him. “How old did you say?” he asked Frank.

  “Four hundred thousand years.”

  “Unbelievable. But look, you know—I really hate to say this—but it doesn’t look like it would fly like a frisbee.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Also, that thing about how it wouldn’t make a very good hand axe, because it’s sharpened all the way around? Actually it seems to me you could hold it almost anywhere and still hit something without cutting your hand. The edge isn’t sharp enough.”

  “True.”

  “Have you tried throwing it yet?”

  “No.”

  “Well heck, let’s give it a try.”

  “Let’s throw it at a rabbit!”

  “Now come on.”

  “Hey we have to test this thing, how else are we going to do it? Throw it at one of those tapirs, it’ll bounce right off them.”

  “No it won’t.”

  “You kill it you eat it.”

  “Fine by me!”

  They ran the course, and when they came to the meadow near picnic site 14, they stopped and Frank pulled out the axe, and they threw it at a tree (it left an impressive gash) and then at trash bottles set up on a log. Yes, you could break a bottle with it, if you could hit it; and it did tend to spin on its axis, though not necessarily horizontally; in fact it tended to rotate through a spiral as it flew forward.

  “You could kill a rabbit if you hit it.”

  “True with an ordinary rock though.”

  “You could spook a big animal by the watering hole.”

  “True with an ordinary rock though.”

  “All right, okay.”

  “It’d work to skin an animal I guess.”

  “That’s true,” Frank said. “But they’ve tried that in South Africa, and they’ve found that they lose their edge really quick, like after one animal.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “That’s what they found. That’s why they think there might be so many of them. They think they used to just knap a new one pretty much any time they needed to do something.”

  “Hmm, I don’t know. This thing looks pretty perfect for a throwaway. It looks like someone’s favorite tool.”

  “His Swiss Army knife.”

  “That’s just patination. It’s four hundred thousand years old, man. That’s old. Older than art and religion, like you said.”

  “It is art and religion.”

  “A fossilized frisbee.”

  “Fossil killer frisbee.”

  “Except it doesn’t look like that’s what it was.”

  “Well, I’m sticking with it,” Spencer said. “It’s too good a theory to give up on just for the sake of some evidence.”

  “Yahhh!”

  “This is just anecdotal evidence anyway. Means nothing.”

  Frisbee golf in the last hour of light, running through the flickering shadow and light. Working up a sweat, making shots magnificent or stupid. Living entirely in his frisbee mind, nothing else intruding. The blessed no-time of meditation. Sports could do that sometimes, and in that sense, it did become religion. Turning the moment into eternity.

  His shelter was completely rain-proofed now, and given the frequent summer showers, this made for a wonderfully satisfying situation: his little room, open-sided under its clear plastic canopy, was frequently walled by sheets of falling water, like a bead curtain perpetually falling. The rain pounded down with its plastic drumming noise, like the shower you hear in the morning when your partner gets up—a susurrus or patter, riding on the liquid roar of the forest and the clatter of the creek below. The air less humid than during those muggy days when the rain held off.

  Often it rained just before dawn or just after. Charcoal turning gray in the dimness of a rainy day. Low clouds scudding or lowering overhead. Sometimes he would sleep again for another half hour. The night’s sleep would have been broken, no matter where he spent the night; something would bring him up, his heart racing for no reason, then the brain following: thinking about work, or Caroline, or Marta, the Khembalis, the homeless guys, the frisbee players, housing prices in north San Diego County—anything could spark it off, and then it was very difficult to fall back asleep. He would lie there, in van or tree house or very occasionally his office, aware that he needed more sleep but unable to drop back in.

  Rain then would be a blessing, as the sound tended to knock him out. And rain in the morning gave him time to lie there and think about projects, experiments, animals, papers, money, women. Time to remember that many men his age, maybe most men his age, slept with a woman every night of their lives, to the point where they hardly even noticed it, except in their partner’s absence.

  Better to think about work.

  Or to look at the pattern leaves made against the sky, black against the velvet grays. Stiffly shift around, trying to wake up, until he was sitting on the edge of the platform, sleeping bag draped over him like a cape, feet swinging in air, to listen for the gibbons. Insomnia as a kind of a gift, then, from nature, or Gaia, or the animals and birds, or his unquiet unconscious. Of course one woke a little before dawn! How could you not? It was so beautiful. Sometimes he felt like he was sitting on the edge of some great thing that only he could see was about to happen. Some change like morning itself, but different.

  Other days he woke and could only struggle to escape the knot his stomach had been tied into during the night. Then it took the gibbons to free him. If they were within earshot, and he heard them lift their voices, then all was immediately well within him, the knot untied. An aubade: all will be well, and all will be well, and all will be perfectly well. That was what they were singing, as translated by some nuns in medieval Europe. It was another gift. Sometimes he just listened, but usually he sang with them, if singing was the right word. He hooted, whooped, called; but really it was most like singing, even if the word he sang was always “ooooooooop,” and every ooop was a glissando, sliding up or down. Ooooooop! Ooooooop!

  If they sounded like they were nearby, he would descend from his tree and try to spot them. He had to be quiet, and as invisible as possible. But this was true for all his stalking. Light steps, looking down at the still-gray ground, seeking footfalls between the ubiquitous twigs, in the bare black mud.

  All the animals in the park were pretty skittish by now, and the gibbons and siamangs were no exception. At the least noise someone in the gibbon gang would shout some kind of warning (often a loud “Aaack!,” as in the comic strip Cathy) and then they would tarzan away with only a few muffled calls to indicate even what direction they had gone. Typically they move
d fifty to a hundred yards before resettling; so if they spooked, Frank usually shifted his hunt to some other animal. You couldn’t beat brachiation in a forest.

  He would work his way down Rock Creek, headed for the waterhole overlook. FOG had put a salt lick on the edge of the water. He was careful in his final approach, because the overlook itself had been marked by big paw prints, feline in appearance but large, huge in fact—like sign of the missing jaguar, still unsighted, or at least unreported. Or maybe the prints were of one of the forest’s smaller cats, the snow leopard or lynx or the native bobcat. In any case not a good animal to catch by surprise. Sometimes he even approached the overlook clutching his hand axe, reassured by the heft of it.

  Once there he could watch the animals below, drinking warily and taking licks of the salt lick. On this morning he saw two of the tiny tamarins, a gazelle, an okapi, and the rhinoceros, all radio-tagged already. The day before he had seen a trio of red wolves bring down a young eland.

  After the waterhole he explored, striking out to get mildly lost, in the process checking out the tributaries in Rock Creek’s rippled watershed. Stealthy walking in the hope of spotting animals: again, as with the heft of the hand axe, or the swaying of his tree in the wind, it felt familiar to his body, as if he had often done it before. Used to things he had never done. Stalking—paparazzi following movie stars—

  Slink of gray flashing over the creek.

  In his memory he reconstructed the glimpse. Silvery fur; something like a fisher or minx. Bounding over the rocks in a hurry.

  Around a corner he came on the hapless tapirs, rooting in the mud. This forest floor did not have what they needed, and Frank had heard they were living off care packages provided by the zoo staff and FOG members. Some people argued that this meant they should be recaptured. Only animals that could make their way in the forest on their own should be considered for permanent feral status, these people argued.

  Of course many of the feral species were tropical or semitropical. Already there was a lot of debate about what to do when winter came. Possibly the feral project for these creatures would come to an end; although it wasn’t clear exactly how some of them could be recaptured.

  Well, they would cross that bridge when they came to it. For now, GPS the tapirs, add them to his FOG phone’s log. So far his list included forty-three non-native species, from aardvarks to zebras. Then trudge out west to his van, to drive over the river to Optimodal. Often all this would happen and he would still get to the gym before seven.

  After that, the day got more complicated. No meetings at eight, so a quick visit to the Optimodal weight room. If he ran into Diane, they worked out together. That was habitual, and it was getting a little complicated, actually. Not that it wasn’t fun, because it was. Her hand on his arm: it was interesting. But friendly conversations and shared workouts with a woman at the gym suggested a certain kind of relationship, and when the woman in question was also one’s boss—also single, or at least known to have been widowed several years before—there was no way to avoid certain little implications that seemed to follow, expressed by the ways in which they didn’t meet each other’s eye or discuss various matters, also little protocols and courtesies, steering clear of what might be more usual behaviors in the gym situation. He often began a workout feeling he was too preoccupied by other concerns to think about this matter; but quickly enough it was unavoidable. Diane’s businesslike cheer and quick mind, her industry and amusement, her musely middle-aged body flexing and pinking before him, sometimes under his care—it was impossible not to be affected by that. She looked good. He wanted Caroline to call him again.

  To tell the truth, ever since his encounter with Francesca, all women looked good to him. In the Metro, at NSF, in the gym. Some mornings it was better just to shower and shave and get right over to work. Into his office, sit down with coffee, survey the huge list of Things To Do. Many of them were very interesting things, like:

  1. quantify the “estimated maximum takedown” for every carbon capture method suggested in the literature (for next Diane meeting)

  2. talk to Army Corps of Engineers

  3. formalize criteria for MacArthur-style awards to researchers

  4. talk to UCSD about assisting new institute in La Jolla

  Pick one and dive in, and then it was a rapid flurry of meetings, phone calls, reading at furious speed, memos, reports, abstracts—God bless abstracts, if only everything were written as an abstract, what would be lost after all— writing at the same furious speed, memos mostly, abstracts no matter what, need to do this, need to do that. All the little steps needed if things were ever going to get done.

  Then another meeting with Diane and several members of the National Science Board. Diane seemed a bit grim to Frank this time; not surprising to him, as really she was trying almost by force of will to make NSF a major node in the network of scientific organizations working on climate. So she was doing exactly what Frank had urged her to do in his presentation before the flood, and though no one would ever speak of it in that way, he found himself pleased. Jump into action as soon as they could identify an action. All the board members in attendance seemed on board with that. Potential partners were being identified in the scientific community, also supportive members of Congress, sympathetic committees. As Diane kept saying, they needed legislation, they needed funding. Meanwhile she was working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Council for Science, the World Conservation Union, the National Academy of Engineering, NASA and NOAA, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the World Meteorological Organization, the World Resources Institute, the Pew Charitable Trust, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Nature Conservancy, the Ecological Society of America, DIVERSITAS, which was the umbrella program to coordinate global research effort in the biodiversity sciences, and GLOBE, which stood for Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment—And so on,” she concluded, looking impassively at the PowerPoint slide listing these organizations. “There are many more. There is no shortage of organizations. Government agencies, UN, scientific societies, NGOs. The situation is in many ways being intensely monitored. Whether all these efforts can be coordinated and lead to any action is another question. It’s the question I want to discuss today, after we’ve gotten through the other items on the agenda. This is the real problem: we know, but we can’t act.”

  The more Frank watched Diane in these meetings, the more he liked her. She got things done without making a fuss. She was not diverted, she kept to the important points, she made sure everyone knew what she thought was important. She didn’t waste time. She worked with people and through people— as she did with Frank—and people worked like maniacs for her, thinking they were pursuing their own projects (and often they were), but enacting Diane’s projects too; and she was the one coordinating them, enabling them. Setting the pace and finding the money.

  Now she came back to Frank’s chief interest. “We have to consider potential interventions in the biosphere itself,” shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe what she was saying. “If there are ways to tip the global climate back out of this abrupt change, we should identify them and do them. Too much else that we want to do will be hammered if we don’t accomplish that. So, can it be done, and if so, how? Which interventions have the best chance, and which can we actually do?”

  “It makes sense to try to work on the trigger we’ve already identified,” Frank said.

  Diane nodded. That meant the stalled downwelling of the thermohaline circulation, and she had already begun discussions with the UN and the IPCC broaching the possibility of overcoming the stall. “We’ll get a report on that later. Right now, what about carbon capture methods?”

  Frank went down the list he had compiled.

  1. freezing carbon dioxide extracted from coal-fired power plants and other industrial
sources, and depositing the dry ice on the ocean floor near subduction zones or river deltas, where it would be buried,

  2. injecting frozen CO2 into emptied oil wells or underground aquifers (a DOE project, tested by Canada and Norway already),

  3. fertilizing oceans with iron to stimulate phytoplankton and absorb more CO2,

  4. gathering agricultural wastes and dropping them to the ocean floor in giant weighted torpedoes,

  5. gathering ag waste and converting it to ethanol for fuel,

  6. growing biomass, both to burn in biofuels and to sequester carbon for the life of the plants (corn, poplar trees)

  7. altering bacteria or other plant life to speed its carbon uptake, without triggering release of nitrous oxides that were more potent greenhouse gases than CO2 itself.

  This last point was vexing all plans to stimulate carbon drawdown by biological means. “It’s the law of unintended consequences,” as one ecologist had put it to Frank. Now he explained to Diane and the others: “Say your iron spurs the growth of marine bacteria, drawing down carbon, but that includes the growth of types of bacteria that release nitrous oxides. And NOs are a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Also, a lot of the carbon in the ocean is fixed in dead diatom shells. Some marine bacteria feed on dead diatoms, and when they do, they free up that carbon, which had been fixed in carbonates that would have eventually become limestone. So is fertilizing the ocean with iron necessarily going to result in a net drawdown in greenhouse gases? Even in the short term it isn’t sure.”

  “We need to be sure,” Diane said.

  “That’s going to be hard, in this area anyway.”

  In another meeting they discussed methods that had been proposed for direct climate alteration, including adding chemicals to jet fuel so that contrails would last longer and reflect more light back into space; seeding clouds; shooting dust into the upper atmosphere in imitation of volcanoes; and flying various sunscreens to high altitude. Again, because of the complexity of the various feedback mechanisms, and the importance of water vapor both in blocking incoming light and holding in outgoing heat, it was hard to predict what the result of any given action would be. No one had a good sense of how clouds might change in any given scenario.