Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “The forest it wants this city back, you know it does! That’s who’s winning.”

  “—two three years I swear. But city knows some of us’ll keep at it, so they keep cutting staff.”

  “They cut more people than trees!”

  Cutter laughed. “Yesterday Byron couldn’t buckle his harness but in the last hole, you know he’s so fat these days, and so it gave loose on him as he finished dropping a big branch, and he fell and popped out of the waist belt but his legs held, so he swung down and the chainsaw smacked him right here on top of his leg. So he’s hanging there screaming like a fool, I cut my leg, I cut off my leg oh God! But weren’t no cut on his leg, just a bruise and a scrape. So we calling up to him, Byron you okay, ain’t no cut on your leg, quit your wiggling, you gonna slip out your harness and crack your head like a egg. But he was yelling so loud he never heard us, My leg, my leg, I’ve cut off my laaig! I can’t feel it no more! And we telling him, Open your eyes fool and look you’re fine, and he won’t do it. I can’t stand to see it! His eyes all squished shut, No no no, I can’t do it I can’t stand to see it, I can’t stand to look it’s too horrible, I can feel it’s gone, I can feel the blood dripping!”

  The bros loved this. “I can feeeel it!” It was obvious this was something they’d be saying for months to come, a new addition to their clutch of stock phrases.

  “How’d you get him down?”

  “We had to pinch his eyelids open and make him look.”

  Bursts of raucous laughter, shouted comments, a mocking re-enactment of how it must have been. Another little climax of hilarity or celebration punctuating the day.

  After that they sank slowly into sullen peacefulness or sullen squabbling, same as always. The various aches and complaints. Fedpage went back to his Post, the rest to the chessboard or the scraps on the grill topping the flue of the smoky fire. Dry leaves and wet branches and again the meat was both black with smoke and undercooked. Prod the fire to keep it sputtering along. Out into the dark for a round of copious urination. Some slipped off to find another haunt; others slumped in their places, the evening’s entertainment over.

  Frank walked out into the night. Sound of the creek, the citysurround. Voices in the distance; there were people at site 20, as always, and also at 18, which was a surprise. As he closed on his tree it got quieter and so did he, making his final approach as quietly as possible, covered by the noise of the creek a short distance below. Under his tree he waited, listening carefully. Night goggles, survey the scene; nothing warm upstream or down. When he was convinced no one was nearby, he called down Miss Piggy and clambered up into the night, up into his aerie, like a mountaineer scaling a last overhang to a ledge camp.

  He pulled through the gap in the rail and sat on the plywood. Cranking Miss Piggy up, it occurred to him that the rent he was saving these days might eventually enable him to afford a down payment on a house, when he finally returned to San Diego. A quick calculation indicated that to save enough he would have to stay up here some five or six years.

  Well—it could be worse. It was not such a bad prospect, really. Up in the night and the wind, swaying slightly north and south; how bad was that?

  He lay down on his bed. In the mellow glow of his battery-powered Coleman lantern, he opened a paperback copy of Italo Calvino’s The Baron In the Trees. He had seen the book in Second Story and bought it, thinking it might teach him something. But so far it had been short on logistical detail, and lacking also the explanatory power he was hoping for. The young baron had barged into the trees one day after a fight with his father, which was believable enough, but unilluminating. And his decision to stay up there the rest of his life, without ever coming down at all, was simply unreasonable. Cosimo could have done everything he had done and still come down from time to time. Not coming down made it more of a parable than a program. An allegory, perhaps, for staying in nature no matter what. Well, in that sense Cosimo was a hero, his story a good fable.

  But Frank was content to be up here when he was, without wanting more. Around him the aging leaves clattered, and in the distance the cry of a loon, or maybe even a coyote—in any case one of those crazies who would not shut up at night. Like certain of the bros. Every animal trait had its echo in some human quality. “Owwww,” he howled quietly. “Owwwwwww.” The tree rocked him in its slight syncopation against the wind.

  He wanted Caroline to call him. He was tired of waiting for her to call, why didn’t she call? Surely she knew he was waiting. Even if she had trouble at home, even if she couldn’t get away, surely she could call? Could she be in trouble? Could her husband (an awful phrase) have her under surveillance? Such tight surveillance that she couldn’t get away to call? Could he have that same kind of surveillance trained on Frank, making it doubly hard for her to call? Was there some reason why she couldn’t get loose like she had before? After all, she had both called and appeared in the Bethesda park. Perhaps it required a stay with her friends. Who were these friends she had stayed with? Whose boat had she been on during the flood? Had she been under surveillance then? Why didn’t she . . . but maybe she couldn’t— but why didn’t she call?

  He was getting sleepy. There were so many questions he couldn’t answer, couldn’t ask. So much he didn’t know. There were so many times when he wanted to touch her again. Kiss her. Have his face in her hair. In her absence this specific desire was becoming a general desire, diffusing into the landscape itself. In D.C. that could be quite an experience; the women of Washington were gorgeous. All the exiled goddesses of Earth passed you by on the street. Every woman metamorphosed into the movie star who would have played her on screen; every woman became the avatar of her particular type and yet remained completely herself. Why didn’t she call?

  Voices below. Frank hung like a spirit above them. No way people would see him in the dark, even infrared wouldn’t work through the plywood and the branch-camouflaged insulation tacked to its underside; he had tested that to be sure.

  The voices were discussing something, it sounded like plans. He surveiled until they moved off and were lost in the sound of the creek.

  She didn’t call because of surveillance. Frank had looked into this a little, what this might mean to be under surveillance in this day and age. But he had been using his computer at work to make the search, at first, and that began to seem like it might put out a flag of some kind. He had felt constrained, and started to do his research in the NSF library, a very different resource. Maybe he had already given himself away. Would they become suspicious (if they were watching), concluding that he knew they were watching? And if so, would that increase or otherwise alter the watching?

  Frank read and heard all kinds of things about modern surveillance, and whenever he asked Edgardo about it on their runs, when they would not be overheard, Edgardo would grin and nod and say “That’s right.” He said “That’s right” to everything, until Frank said “Are you saying you don’t really know what’s going on and neither does anyone else on Earth?”

  “That’s right.”

  It was an impossible situation. No amount of googling would clarify it, and indeed any very extensive hunt might catch someone’s attention and make his situation worse. Better to lay low. Better to investigate by talking only to people who might know, and wouldn’t tell anyone else, in places where they wouldn’t be overheard. Strange but true; the possibility of electronic surveillance was driving him back to the oldest technology of all, talking out in the open air.

  He wondered if Yann knew he was under surveillance, or that he was the reason many people of his acquaintance were also. He was going to have to talk to Yann.

  He had discussed with Diane his idea of headhunting Pierzinski, and she had liked it. Carbon sequestration was in large part a biological problem; the amount of carbon they wanted to shift was beyond any currently affordable and deployable industrial capacity. They needed to involve the bacterial world, if they could. Pierzinski had been working on an algorithm that Frank
thought might give them a much finer ability to predict and manipulate genomes, and apparently Yann and Eleanor and Marta were having their best successes at the bacterial level.

  So he should go to Atlanta and talk to Yann. Add that to his visit to Francesca and he might even tweak the futures market in a way that Caroline could notice and tell him about when she called. And he needed to get a sense of how Pierzinski’s algorithm was coming along, and what Yann might be thinking about how he wanted his work situation to be configured.

  But talking to Yann meant he would have to see Marta again. She and Yann lived together, so it seemed that if he flew down to meet with Yann, Marta would have to be part of it one way or another. That might very well be awful. The last time he had seen her had been terrible. However, too bad; he still had to do it. It would end up worse if he went down there and tried to see Yann while avoiding her. That would backfire for sure, although it might not be possible to make her any more angry with him than she already was, so maybe it didn’t matter.

  But a part of him wanted to see her again anyway. All these women he was thinking about—mainly Caroline, the thought of whom made his heart pulse, and also perhaps spread a certain feeling over thoughts of Diane and her clever calmness, or even Francesca, whom he didn’t want to think about at all—all these thoughts often led in the end back to Marta, a woman he had lived with for years, someone he really knew and had had a relationship with, even if it had imploded. She would still be mad at him. But he had to see her.

  From Atlanta’s airport he took a shuttle to a hotel downtown. The area around Georgia Tech featured wide avenues running up and down waves of low hills, between huge glossy skyscrapers, copper and blue and dragonfly green. The school’s football stadium appeared below street level to his right as the shuttle inched along, reminding him with a brief pang of Khembalung.

  After checking into the hotel Frank showered, then dressed with more care than usual. Uneasy glances in the mirror. Pierzinski had a little touch of Asperger’s, not uncommon in mathematicians; over the phone he had agreed to Frank’s request for a meeting with innocent delight, saying, “I’ll bring Marta along, she’ll love to see you.”

  Frank had recalled his last encounter with Marta in San Diego, and held his tongue. It was enough to make him wonder just how close Yann and Marta were. Maybe she was not in the habit of talking to Yann about her past. Frank hoped not.

  Anyway, she would be there. Her unavoidable connection to Yann still surprised Frank a little; Marta and Yann did not seem to him a likely couple; but then again what couple did?

  Yann had suggested a restaurant nearby as a place to meet. Frank remained stuck before his hotel bathroom mirror. He found he really didn’t want to go. He was almost afraid to go. He looked neon pink in the mirror, somewhat boiled by the shower. He looked like he was wearing a costume signifying “academic at lunch.” Best give up on appearances. Marta knew what he looked like.

  As did whoever was spying on him. And spying on Yann and Marta as well! This would be a red-blink situation, presumably: three of that market’s commodities getting together.

  He left the hotel and walked to the restaurant Yann had suggested, called Manuel’s. It was a sultry night, a wet wind pouring like syrup through the streets. Marta had sent him directions in an e-mail that had no personal touches whatsoever. Not a good sign.

  Manuel’s turned out to be an old-fashioned saloon, thick with the smell of old cigar smoke and machine politics. Wooden beams crossed the ceiling in Tudor style, dividing the space into small rooms. Sports paraphernalia, TVs overhead. A perfect place to spy on someone. The walls of the entryway were covered with black-and-white photos of groups sitting at the biggest tables, men in vests. Campaign buttons surrounded the photos. It was hard for Frank to imagine Marta even entering such a place.

  But she was there already, it turned out, seated in a booth at the back with Yann. “Hi Yann, hi Marta.”

  Yann rose and shook his hand; Marta didn’t. After one charged look Frank avoided her gaze and sat down, trying not to cringe. He thought of Caroline, brought her deliberately to mind; the look in her eye; then by accident thought of Diane too. Francesca. Caroline’s touch. He knew some powerful women. Too many one might say. He met Marta’s eye again, held his ground. Ooooop! Oooooop!

  They made small talk of the how-have-you-been variety, ordered drinks. It was early, and Frank and Marta declined food, while Yann ordered French fries. When they arrived Yann downed them like popcorn, bang bang bang.

  Silence inevitably fell, Yann being so busy. “So what brings you here?” Marta said.

  “Well, I’m still at NSF.”

  Frank knew that Marta thought he had gone to NSF to escape her, back when they were breaking up. So this also might be construed as saying he had had other reasons for going there.

  She wasn’t buying it. “Why would you do that?”

  “Well, I’ve gotten interested in things NSF can do that UCSD can’t. National policy, and some big new programs. I was offered the chance to help with some of them, so I decided to give it a try.”

  “Uh huh,” Marta said. “So what are you doing?”

  “Well, a number of things. But one of them is looking into trying to start up some institutes, like the Max Planck Institutes in Germany, that would focus on particular problems. And, you know, one of the obvious things to look at would be the stuff you guys were doing out in San Diego. You know, trying to do a really robust proteomics, with the idea that if we got that going properly, it might lead to some really important advances. So I came down to see, well, you know—to see if you’d have any interest in joining something like that.”

  Well, if spies were listening in, then they knew all. Frank shuddered at the idea that he had ever tried to rig this game with his Thornton-in-the-panel.

  Headhunting, however, was standard practice.

  “It’s going fine,” Marta said curtly. “Small Delivery is part of Bizet.” One of the Big Pharms, as Edgardo put it. “We’ve got a budget bigger than anything NSF could offer.”

  This was not true, and Frank longed to say I’ve got two billion dollars to spend, does Bizet have two billion dollars? He clamped his jaw shut; his jaw muscles would be bunching in a way she knew to notice. She knew him. He tried to relax. “Well . . . so, you’re still working on the same stuff you were in San Diego?”

  The French fries were gone, and Yann nodded. “The algorithm is working better on plant genomes? So some of the algae work is getting really predictable.”

  Marta frowned. She didn’t like Yann saying even this much.

  Frank felt his stomach shrinking. He and Marta had been together for four very intense years, and their breakup had been so terrible . . . the dread and remorse from that time were like a vise inside him still, ready to clamp down any time he thought about it. A lot of what had happened between them had been his fault. He had known that for most of the last year, but now it was all falling on him again. Anger vibed across the table at him in waves, and he couldn’t meet her gaze.

  Yann appeared oblivious to all this. It was kind of hard to believe. It was also hard to imagine these two together. Yann was describing some of the tweaking he had done to his algorithm, and Frank did his best to follow, and to ask the questions he had come down to ask. How did that work? How would that work? Would more research funds speed the work on it? It was important to concentrate. It was important to get a better fix on how Pierzinski’s work was progressing. Frank still had ideas about where it could go, and he wanted to talk about that.

  But it became clear Yann had changed emphasis during his time at Small Delivery. At first Frank didn’t follow the significance of the changes. “So you’re engineering changes in lichen?” he asked, feeling that Marta’s glare was making him stupid.

  Marta answered for Yann. “It’s not about human health anymore,” she said, sharply. “We’re interested in engineering a tree lichen that will incorporate carbon into the host trees much faster than they
do naturally.”

  Frank sat back. “So, a kind of carbon sink thing?”

  “Yes. A kind of carbon sink thing.”

  Frank thought it over. “Why?” he said finally.

  Yann said, “The problems with gene uptake in humans were getting too complicated, we just couldn’t. . . .”

  “We couldn’t make it work,” Marta said flatly. “No one can. It may be the showstopper for the whole idea of gene therapy. They can’t get altered genes into cells without infecting them with a virus, and a lot of times that’s a really bad idea. That’s what it comes down to.”

  “Well, but these nanobits look promising,” Yann said enthusiastically. “We’re making little bits of metal? They hold DNA on one side, and then when the metal bits imbed in cell walls, the DNA leaves the nanobits and crosses inside and is taken up.”

  “In vivo?”

  “No, in vitro, but they’re about ready for phase ones.”

  “We,” Marta corrected him.

  “Yeah, but the other lab. And we’re working on some Venter viruses too, you can build some pretty harmless viruses that alter the bacteria they jump into. The algorithms there are about the same as the lichen augmenters.” Suddenly he looked at his watch. “Hey, I’m sorry Frank, but I have to go. I had a previous appointment I can’t let down.”

  Abruptly he stood and extended a greasy hand to Frank, shook hands briefly, and with a quick wave to Marta was out the door.

  Frank stared at the space Yann had vacated. What was Yann thinking, this was an appointment they had made, Frank had flown down for it! And now here he was alone with Marta. It was like the things that tended to happen in his nightmares, and quickly fear began to fill him.

  “Well,” he said experimentally.

  Marta continued to alternate between staring and glaring. Unbidden, and indeed squirting out with the sudden force characteristic of the return of the repressed, he recalled her on the beach at Cardiff Reef, shouting leave me alone.