Fifty Degrees Below sitc-2

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Emotion: an evolutionary byproduct of the neural regulation of the autonomic nervous system.” The sociobiological view, for once of less interest to Frank. He would come back to that later. “Reciprocal limbic-cortical functioning and decision-making: converging PET findings in lack of affect and indecision.” “Neuroanatomical correlates of happiness, sadness, and decisiveness. “Both studies of the emotion/decision connection. “Subgenual prefrontal cortex abnormalities in mood disorders.” A study of a case who was unusually wild and incompetent in life decisions, unlike anyone else in her family, and then they remembered that when she was an infant a car had run over her head.

  “From the nose to the brain.” Oh my; there were synapses that ran from one end of the head to the other. They went from the nose to everywhere. Scent, memory, behaviors associated with pleasure. These tapped into dopamine that was made available in the nucleus accumbens in the basal forebrain, behind the back of the mouth. This availability depended on a long biochemical sequence functioning well at every point.

  The right frontal cortices were more associated with negative emotions than the left; the right somatosensory cortices were active in integrating body management, which might be why they were the apparent seat of empathy. Blocking oxytocin in a female prairie vole did not interfere with its sex drive, but with the attachment to its partner that would usually correlate to sex. Suppressing vasopressin had the same effect on male voles, who would normally be faithful for life, voles being monogamous. You needed both the insula and the anterior cingulate working well to be able to experience joy. Fluency of ideation increased with joy, decreased with sorrow. The brain was often flooded with endogenous opioid peptides such as endomorphines, enkephalin, dynorphin, endorphins—all painkillers. You needed those. Brain systems that supported ethical behaviors were probably not dedicated to ethics exclusively, but rather also to biological regulation, memory, decision-making, and creativity. In other words, to everything. You needed joy to function well. In fact, it appeared that competent or successful decision-making depended on full capability in all the emotions; and these in turn depended on a healthy prefrontal cortex.

  It looked to Frank like all the new research was adding up to a new understanding of the roles played by the various elements of human thought, consciousness, behavior; a new model or paradigm, in which emotion and feeling were finally understood to be indispensable in the process of proper reasoning. Decision-making in particular was a reasoning process in which the outcomes of various possible solutions were judged in terms of how they might feel. Without that, the ability to decide well was crippled. This was Damasio’s main point: the definition of reason as a process that abjured all emotion had been wrong. Descartes and most of Western philosophy since the Greeks had been wrong. It was the feel one was looking for.

  Judging from the evolutionary history of the brain, it seemed clear that feelings had entered the picture in prehuman species, as part of social behaviors. Sympathy, attachment, embarrassment, pride, submission, censure and recompense, disgust (at cheaters), altruism, compassion; these were social feelings, and arrived early on, perhaps before language and the “string of sentences” that often seemed to constitute conscious thought. And they were perhaps more important, as overall cognitive strategy was formed by unconscious mentation in regions such as the ventromedial frontal lobe (right behind the nose). Life was feeling one’s way toward a goal which ultimately equated to achieving and maintaining certain feelings.

  So an excess of reason was indeed a form of madness! Just as Rudra Cakrin had said in his lecture. It was something the Buddhist tradition had discovered early on, by way of introspection and analysis alone. A kind of science, a natural history.

  Which was impressive, but Frank found himself comforted to have the assertion backed by scientific research and a neurological explanation. Or some first hypotheses concerning explanations. For one thing it was a chance to come at the problem in a fresh way, with new data. Buddhist thinkers, and those in the Western philosophical tradition who used introspection and logic alone to postulate “how the mind works,” had been mulling over the same data for five thousand years, and now seemed caught up in preconceptions, distinctions, and semantic hairsplitting of all kinds. Introspection did not give them the means to investigate unconscious thought; and unconscious thought was proving to be crucial. Even consciousness, standing there in the mirror to be looked at (maybe)—even what could be introspected or deduced was so extremely complex, and distributed through so many different parts of the parcellated brain, that you could not think your way through it. It needed a group effort, working on the physical action inside the object itself. It needed science.

  And now science was using new tools to move beyond its first achievements in taxonomy and basic junction; it was getting into analysis of evidence collected from living minds, from brains both healthy and damaged. It was a huge effort, involving many labs and scientists, and still involved in the process of paradigm construction. Some academic philosophers cast scorn on the simplicity of these researchers’ early models, but to Frank it was better than continuing to elaborate theories generated by the evidence of introspection alone. Obviously there was still far to go, but until you took the first steps you would never be on the way.

  It was noticeable that the Dalai Lama always welcomed the new results from brain science. It would help Buddhists to refine their own beliefs, he said; it was the obvious thing to do. And it was true that many academic philosophers interested in consciousness also welcomed the new findings.

  Welcomed or not, all the papers from the new body of work were accumulating on the net. And so Frank lay there in bed, reading them on his laptop, unable to figure out what he felt, or what he should do next, or if he might have a physical problem. Damasio, a leader in this new research: “The system is so complex and multilayered that it operates with some degree of freedom.” Oh yes, he was free, no doubt of that—but was he damaged? What did he feel? What was this feeling, like oceans of clouds in his chest? And what should he do next?

  The Khembali house in Arlington was just as crowded as Frank had thought it would be, maybe even more so. It was a big house, perhaps built to be a boarding house from the start, with a ground floor of big public rooms and three floors of bedrooms above, many of them off long central hallways, and an extensive basement. But as a good percentage of the Khembali populace was being housed in these rooms, all of them were overflowing.

  Clearly it would be best if he continued to live out of his van, using the bathrooms at NSF and Optimodal. But his Khembali friends were adamant in their invitation.

  Sucandra said, “Please, Frank. Join Rudra Cakrin in his room. No one else will move in there, and yet he needs someone. And he likes you.”

  “Doesn’t he like everybody?”

  Sucandra and Padma regarded each other.

  “Rudra was the oracle,” Padma told Frank.

  “So?”

  Sucandra said, “It seems one old Bon spirit that used to visit him comes back from time to time.”

  “Also,” Padma added, “he seems to feel we have lost Tibet. Or failed to recover it. He doesn’t think he will see it again in this life. It makes him …”

  “Irritable.”

  “Angry.”

  “Perhaps a little mad.”

  “He does not blame you for any of this, however.”

  “To him you represent another chance for Tibet.”

  “No, he just likes you. He knows the situation with Tibet is hopeless, at least for some time to come.”

  An exile. Frank had never been an exile in the formal sense, and never would be; but living on the East Coast had given him a profound sense of not being at home. Bioregional displacement, one might say; and for a long time he had hated this place. Only in the last year had the forest begun to teach him how it could be loved. And if the great eastern hardwood forest had repelled him, how much more might it repel a man from the treeless roof of the world? Who c
ould never go home?

  So Frank felt he understood that part of Rudra’s moodiness. The visiting demon, however … Well, these were religious people. They weren’t the only religious people Frank knew. It should resemble talking to Baptists, and he had gotten used to that. It was just another worldview in which the cosmos was filled with invisible agents, intervening in human affairs.

  He could always focus on the shared pain of displacement. Besides, Sucandra and Padma were asking for his help.

  So that night Drepung took him in to see Rudra Cakrin, in a tiny room off the stair landing before the flight to the attic, a space that might once have been a closet. There was only room for a single bed and a slot between it and the wall.

  Rudra was sitting up in bed. He had been ill, and looked much older than Frank had ever seen him. “Please to see you,” he said, peering up at him as they shook hands. “You are my new English teacher, Drepung say. You teach me English, I teach you Tibetan.”

  “That would be good,” Frank said.

  “Very good. My English better than your Tibetan.” He smiled, his face folding into its map of laugh wrinkles. “I don’t know how we fit two beds in here.”

  “I can unroll a groundpad down here,” Frank suggested. “Take it up by day.”

  “Good idea. You don’t mind sleep on floor?”

  “I’ve been sleeping in a tree.”

  Startled, Rudra refocused on Frank. Again the strange intensity of his gaze; he looked right into you. And who else had Frank told about his tree house? No one but Caroline.

  “Good idea!” Rudra said. “One thing right away—I cannot be, what say— guru for you.”

  “That’s okay, I already have a guru. He teaches me frisbee.”

  “Good idea.”

  Afterward Frank said to Drepung, “He seems fine to me.”

  “So you will share a room with him?”

  “Whatever you like. I’m your guest. You decide.”

  “Thank you. I think it will be good for both of you.”

  There was no denying that Frank felt deeply uneasy about moving indoors, as if he were breaking a promise to someone. A kind of guilt, but more importantly a profound physical unease, a tightness in the chest, a numbness in the head. But it was more all-encompassing than that.

  On waking in the mornings he would get up from his groundpad in Rudra’s room, roll it up, stick it under Rudra’s bed, go downstairs and out the door, almost sick to his stomach with anxiety. Shivering in the driver’s seat of his van, he would wake up the rest of the way, then drive over to Optimodal, getting there just as they unlocked the doors. Diane was often already there waiting, slapping her mittened hands together. She always had a cheery smile to greet him. He found her consistency impressive. Sometimes his smile in response must have looked wan indeed. And in fact she sometimes put a hand to his arm and asked if he were all right. He always nodded. Yes; all right. Not good not bad. Not anything he could define. Nose still stuffed up, yes, but otherwise okay. Ready to go.

  And in they would go, for a workout that now had the two of them wandering semi-autonomously; they had got past feeling they needed to team up to be friendly, and merely did their own things in such an order that they were often in the same room, and could sometimes talk, or help out with weights or holding ankles. Then it was off to the showers and the daily blessing of hot water running over him. Presumably on the other side of the wall Diane was doing the same under a shower of her own. By now Frank could visualize pretty well what Diane would look like. She would look good. Probably this didn’t matter. It only made him worry about Caroline and what might have happened to her.

  But he worked every day with Diane, and he couldn’t help but admire how skillful she was, and determined. They were entering the final stage of arrangements for the North Atlantic intervention, and Diane now devoted a good part of every day talking to the people running the various parts of it. The International Maritime Organization was in charge of shipping; UNEP was making arrangements for salt; the big four re-insurance companies were providing or raising most of the funding. Wracke and the Corps were providing engineering and logistics.

  There were some 3,500 oil tankers in operation around the world, they had learned, and about thirty percent of those were still the older single-hulled kind that were legally required to be replaced. Five hundred Very Large Crude Carriers were identified by the IMO as being past due for retirement and potentially available for sale or lease, and as the alternative to a deal would be either the breaker’s yard or legal complications, the ship owners were being very accommodating. These old single-hulled VLCCs had an average capacity of ten million tons, small compared to the Ultra Large Crude Carriers now replacing them, but taken altogether, enough to do the job. The real problem here would be maintaining oil supplies at an adequate level with so much shipping taken out of transport all at once, but plans were being made to build up reserves, speed the construction of new double-hulled ULCCs, and return some of the superannuated fleet to oil transport once the salt operation was done.

  So shipping capacity was not proving to be the choke point on the operation. More difficult was coming up with enough salt. Five hundred million metric tons turned out to be equal to about two years of total world production. When the working group first learned this they wondered if the project was impossible, at least in the time frame Diane was calling for. But Diane ordered the group to find out how quickly supplementary salt production could be ramped up. It soon became clear that the 225 million tons a year was more a matter of demand than supply; the salt industry in the Caribbean alone had years of salt dried in the pans ready to go, and the hardrock mines of New Brunswick and the rest of Canada also had a huge inventory, although it was more difficult to speed up extraction there than in the salt pans. In general there was a much greater productive capacity than was needed. Annual supply of highway rock salt in the U.S. only amounted to thirty million tons a year. So there was excess salt, ready at hand in almost every drying pan and hardrock mine on the planet.

  So the plan was physically possible, and the winter’s unprecedented harshness meant it was now greeted with cries of hope and anticipation, rather than the raised eyebrows and shaking heads that had met it the previous summer. Indeed the futures market in salt had already jumped, Frank was interested to learn; prices had shot up five hundred percent. Fortunately enough futures had been bought by Swiss Re to bypass this inflation. Already production had been amped up, and the full complement of salt would be ready later that year, at about the same time the fleet of tankers would be ready to be filled. As far as Diane could tell, the project was on course for a rendezvous of the fleet in the north Atlantic that fall. The unlikely-sounding idea first broached in Diane’s office was going to happen, at a total cost of what looked to be about a hundred billion dollars. Swiss Re reported that they were on schedule in their fundraising, and anticipated no problems.

  “That’s how desperate this winter has made people,” Edgardo observed.

  “I told you the cold snap was a good thing,” Diane replied.

  Frank found it interesting, but beyond that felt little. It was hard to connect all the activity to the brainstorming of last summer, when it had been only one of many ideas, and not the most likely at that. Now it had the look of something obvious and inevitable, what Edgardo called a silver bullet solution; a grand exercise in planetary engineering that was exciting worldwide attention, funding, and controversy.

  Very interesting indeed; but now it was out of their hands, and Frank’s daily work centered on other things. The Carbon Capture Campaign legislation was about to be introduced by one of Phil Chase’s allies on the House Resources Committee, and Frank was involved with the graphs and tables evaluating various options and scenarios. Then also the test result evaluations on three different heat-to-electricity transformers had to be finished; and the SSEEP project was still generating huge amounts of trouble for NSF, as many accused them of illegally entering into president
ial politics, and in a most crassly unfashionable old-left way at that. Diane occasionally thought she would get fired over it, although there was no mechanism or precedent. The heat was coming from all directions—even the Phil Chase campaign, which now appeared to regard the SSEEP platform as some kind of third-party competition. Judging by the results so far, it had possibly been a bad idea to suggest a scientific approach to political problems, but on most days Frank was still glad they had tried it. Something had to be done. Although choosing which something remained a problem. One morning, walking from Optimodal to work, Diane said to him, “So what are you going to work on this morning?”

  And Frank, distracted, said, “I don’t know. I could meet with Kenzo, or talk to George in Engineering, or call Yann. Or I could work on the Stirling calculations, or check into those flexible mirrors. Or call up the photovoltaics group. Or I could call Wracke, or the people at NASA to see if their heavy-duty booster is going to be ready this decade. Or there are these glassy metals I could—”

  The light changed and they crossed Wilson. Diane, laughing at him, said, “You sound like I feel.” But she didn’t know how he felt; and he truly didn’t know what to do. But then going into the building, the way she looked up at him, he saw that she knew that.

  Edgardo and Kenzo dropped by to ask him if he wanted to join them for a run, as he hadn’t for a while. He agreed to it, and they got dressed and took off.

  It was crisp but sunny, perfect for running. It turned out Edgardo and Kenzo had run all winter long, except for during the cold snap. They were the most faithful of the faithful, also the most talkative of the talkative, which no doubt explained it. Only on a long run could you hold the floor for ten or fifteen minutes straight, discoursing on some subject or other while your audience pounded along, happy to listen because it distracted from their effort.