Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  For a while he found other more pressing things on his list of Things To Do. But it kept coming back to mind, and he found he wanted to tell her this stuff anyway, to hear her reaction—how she would manage to downplay it. So that afternoon, after running down to Food Factory and giving Edgardo the disk, Frank went over and called Small Delivery Systems from a pay phone down in the Metro, thinking to reduce the number of obvious contacts in the hope it would keep their stock down. He asked for Marta rather than Yann. After a minute she got on, and Frank said Hi.

  She greeted him coolly, and he hacked his way through the preliminaries until her lack of cooperation forced him to the point. “I got it arranged like you asked, I mean I couldn’t stay in it directly because of conflict of interest, but it was such a good idea that they did it on their own. There’s to be a new federal science and tech center, focused on climate interventions and housed in Torrey Pine Generique’s old labs. And Yann and your whole team down there is listed for a big Grant for Exploratory Research too. So now you can go back to San Diego.”

  “I can go wherever I want,” she said. “I don’t need your permission or your help.”

  “No, that isn’t what I meant.”

  “Uh huh. Don’t be trying to buy me off, Frank.”

  “I’m not. I mean, I owe you that money, but you wouldn’t take it. Anyway this is just a good thing. Yann and you guys get one of the grants, and this will be one of the best research labs anywhere for what you guys are up to.”

  “We already have a lab.”

  “Small Delivery is too small to deliver.”

  “Not so, actually. We’ve just gotten a contract from the Russian government. We’re licensing the genome for our altered tree lichen to them, and we’ll be helping them to manufacture and distribute it in Siberia and Kamchatka this fall.”

  “But—wow. Have you had any field trials for this lichen?”

  “This is the field trial.”

  “What? How big an area?”

  “Lichen propagate by wind dispersion.”

  “That’s what I thought! Have the Russians talked to us or the UN or anyone?”

  “The president believes it’s an internal matter.”

  “But the wind blows from Russia to Alaska.”

  “No doubt.”

  “And so to Canada.”

  “Sure. The spruce forest wraps the whole world at that latitude,” Marta agreed. “Our lichen could eventually spread through all of it.”

  “And what’s the estimated maximum takedown from that, do you suppose?”

  “Eleanor thinks maybe a hundred parts per million.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “I know, it’s a lot. But we figure there’s no way to cause an ice age now, because we can always put carbon back into the atmosphere if we need to. This drawdown at max would only take us most of the way back to before the Industrial Revolution anyway, so the models we run show it will be a good thing, no matter if the takedown goes to one hundred percent of the estimate or not. Or even if it draws down more.”

  “I don’t know how you can say that!”

  “That’s what our models show.”

  “Any idea how fast the propagation will go?”

  “It kind of depends on how we distribute it in the first place.”

  “Jesus, Marta. So the Russians are just doing this?”

  “Yes. The president thinks it’s too important to risk sharing the decision with the rest of the world. Democracy could hang up their best chance of a rescue, he apparently said. They now think that global warming is more of a disaster for them than for anyone else. At first they thought it might warm them up and make for better agriculture, but now their models are predicting drought, and cold more severe than ever, so they’re bummed.”

  “Everyone’s bummed,” Frank said.

  “Yeah but Russia is actually doing something about it. So quit trying to buy me off, Frank. We’re going to be doing fine on our own. We’ve got some performance components in our contract that look good.”

  Villas are cheap in Odessa, Frank didn’t say.

  “The new center hired Leo Mulhouse to run a bio lab,” he said instead.

  “Ah ha! Well. That’s good.” She didn’t want to give him any credit. No matter what you do you’ll still be an asshole, her silence said. “Okay, well. He’ll be good. See you Frank.”

  “Bye Marta.”

  The moment he got off he called Diane, and had to leave a message, but right at the end of the day she called back. He told her what Marta had said, and she was just as surprised as Frank had been, he could tell. Part of him was pleased by this; it meant she had been deceived by Dmitri too, or at least, left in the dark. Not that she sounded like a woman betrayed, of course; indeed, she sounded as if she thought it might be a good development. “My God,” she said as they finished sharing what impressions they had of the situation, “things are getting complicated, aren’t they?”

  “Yes they are.”

  A couple days later she confirmed the news to Frank. She had talked to Dmitri, and he had said yes, they were distributing genetically engineered organisms to draw down quantities of carbon fast. It was only a pilot project and they did not expect the organisms to spread beyond Siberia. He wouldn’t say over how large of an area the GMOs had been distributed, but he did confirm that one of the lichens had been licensed from Small Delivery Systems.

  “Damn it,” Frank said. “That’s Yann. We really need to get him onto our team somehow.”

  Diane said, “I wonder if we can, now.”

  “Well, I think he still wants to move back to San Diego. Not that he couldn’t on his own, but maybe the center at Torrey Pines will look good to him.”

  “Depending on his contract, he may get very little from any work he’s done for Small Delivery. And he may not be in control of his research program.”

  “True.”

  “Let’s keep making the offer. Funding and freedom in San Diego—he may still go for it.”

  MEANWHILE, IN THE MIDST OF ALL this, science itself proceeded in its usual manner; which is to say, very slowly.

  Anna Quibler liked it that way. Take a problem, break it down into parts (analyze), quantify whatever parts you could, see if what you learned suggested anything about causes and effects; then see if this suggested anything about long-term plans, and tangible things to do. She did not believe in revolution of any kind, and only trusted the mass application of the scientific method to get any real-world results. “One step at a time,” she would say to her team in bioinformatics, or Nick’s math group at school, or the National Science Board; and she hoped that as long as chaos did not erupt worldwide, one step at a time would eventually get them to some tolerable state.

  Of course there were all the hysterical operatics of “history” to distract people from this method and its incremental successes. The wars and politicians, the police state regimes and terrorist insurgencies, the gross injustices and cruelties, the unnecessarily ongoing plagues and famines—in short, all the mass violence and rank intimidation that characterized most of what filled the history books; all that was real enough, indeed all too real, undeniable—and yet it was not the whole story. It was not really history, if you wished to include everything important that had happened to humans through time. Because along with all the violence, underneath the radar, inside the nightmare, there was always the ongoing irregular but encouraging pulse of good work, often, since the seventeenth century, created or supported by science. Ongoing increases in health and longevity, for larger and larger percentages of the population: that could be called progress. If they could hold on to what they had done, and get everyone in the world to that bettered state, it would actually be progress.

  Anna was thus a progressive in that limited sense, of evolution not revolution. And for her, science was the medium of progress, progress’s mode of production, if she understood that term; science was both the method of analysis and the design for action.

  The
action itself—that was politics, and thus a descent back into the Bad Zone of history, with all its struggles and ultimately its wars. But those could be defined as the breakdown of the plan, the replacement of the plan by a violent counterplan. The violence was exerted against the plan; and if ever violence was justified, as being necessary to put a good plan into action, the secondary and tertiary results usually were so bad that the justification could later be proved untrue, the plan itself betrayed by the negative effects of its violent implementation.

  Progress had to be made peaceably and collectively. It did not arrive violently. It had to be accomplished by positive actions. Positive ends required positive means, and never otherwise.

  Except, was this true? Sometimes her disgust with the selfishness of the administration she was working for grew so intense that she would have been very happy to see the population rise up and storm the White House, tear it down and hand the furniture to the overstuffed fools who had already wrecked the rest of the government. Violent anger if not violent action.

  Given these feelings, one obvious opportunity for constructive action had been getting scientists involved in the presidential campaign. Whether or not the SSEEP idea was a good one was very hard for her to judge, but in for a penny in for a pound; and she figured that as an experiment it would give some results, one way or another. Unless it didn’t because of a poor design, any results lost in the noise of everything else going on. The social sciences, she thought, must have a terrible time designing experiments that yielded anything confirmable.

  So, ambiguous results, at best; but meanwhile it was still worth trying.

  Her actual involvement with the election campaign was at third or fourth remove, which was just the way she liked it, and probably the only way that it remained legal. She could certainly talk to Charlie about things Phil Chase could do as a candidate, if he wanted to, that might help him win. Or even propose actions to him that Phil might initiate; after which they could respond however they wanted, and she could go back to the things she did at NSF directly. Whether they did anything or not was their concern; and so she was not actively working for a candidate.

  This was partly the usual scientist’s disconnect from political action, which was itself partly a realism about doing what one could. In any case she preferred spending that kind of time working on her archeology of great lost ideas in federal science policy. She had already gotten Charlie to convince Phil to introduce a bill to the Senate that would revive FCCSET in an even stronger form, under the guise of being part of a larger “Climate Planned Response,” or CPR.

  Now she was finding the fossil remnants of various foreign-aid programs that had been focused on science infrastructural proliferation, as she called it. Some of these were inactive because they were funding starved; others had been discontinued. Anna got Diane to assign Laveta and her team to liaise with the UN’s environmental offices, to connect these kinds of projects with funding sources.

  “Let’s fund them ourselves when we can’t find anyone else,” Diane suggested. “Let’s get a group together to start rating these projects and awarding grants.”

  “And Frank would say that group should start writing requests for proposal.”

  Diane nodded. “For sure.”

  NSF was now disbursing money at a truly unprecedented rate. The ten-billion-a-year budget goal, only recently achieved, looked like pump-priming compared to what they were now passing out. Though Congress still would not fully fund the repair of the District of Columbia, the right people on the right committees had been scared enough by the flood to start funding whatever efforts seemed most likely to keep their own districts from suffering the same fate. Maybe it was just a matter of politicians wanting to look statesmanlike when the big moment arrived; maybe they were just reflecting what they were hearing from home; maybe the two parties were jockeying for favor in the upcoming election. Whatever the cause, NSF had a supplementary budget this fiscal year of almost twenty billion dollars, and if they could find good ways to spend other federal money, Congress tended to back them.

  “They lived through this winter and they’ve seen the light,” Edgardo said.

  Anna maintained that the economy could always have afforded to pay for public work like this—that it was not even a particularly large share of the total economy—but that for so many years they had lived within the premises of a war economy that they had forgotten how much humans produced. Now that it was being redirected a little, it was becoming clearer how much the war economy had drained off.

  “Interesting,” Edgardo said, looking intently at her. She very seldom talked about politics. “I wonder if it will correlate with the carbon economy. I mean, that we blew the fossil-fuel surplus on wars, and lost the chance to use a one-time surplus to construct a utopian scientific society. So now we are past the overshoot, and doomed to struggle in extreme danger for some birth-defected smaller version of just-good-enoughness.”

  “One step at a time,” Anna insisted. “By the year 2500 it should all look the same.”

  She liked the way she could make Edgardo laugh. It was easy, in a way; you only had to say out loud the most horrible thing you could imagine and he would shout with laughter, tears springing to his eyes. And she had to admit there was something bracing about his attitude. He bubbled away like a fountain of acids—everything from vinegar to hydrochloric—and it made you laugh. Once you had said the worst, a certain sting was removed; the secret fear of it, perhaps, the superstition that if you said it aloud you made it more likely to come to pass, as with Charlie and disease. Maybe the reverse was true, and nothing you said out loud could thereafter come true, because of the Pauli exclusion principle or something like it. So now she exchanged dire prophecies with Edgardo freely, to defuse them and to make him laugh.

  You needed a theory of black comedy to get through these days anyway, because there was little of any other kind around. Anna worked every minute of her hours at work, until her alarm went off and reminded her it was time to go home. Then she took the Metro home, thankful that it was running again, using that time stubbornly to continue processing jackets, as she used to before the Foundation had gone into crisis mode. Continuing the real work. At home she found that Charlie had been once again sucked into helping Phil Chase’s campaign, an inevitable process now that it was coming down to the wire and they were all doing everything they could; so that he had barely managed to watch Joe while talking on the phone, and had not remembered to go to the store. So off she went, driving so she could stock up on more groceries than could be carried, boggled once again by the destitute look of their grocery store, the best one in the area but sovietized like all the rest of them by the epidemic of hoarding that had plagued her fellow citizens ever since the cold snap, if not the flood. Hoarding was a bad thing; it represented a loss of faith in the system’s ability to supply the necessities reliably. While there might have been some rational basis to it in the beginning, what it now meant is that every time she went to the store huge sections of the shelves were empty, particularly of those products that would be needed in an emergency and could be stored at home: toilet paper, bottled water, flour, rice, canned goods. People were storing these in their houses rather than letting them be stored in the store. She was still waiting for the time when every household maxed, so that when the stores got a shipment the goods would not fly out the doors.

  It also looked like certain fresh foods were permanently in shorter supply than they had been before the long winter. This was a different problem entirely.

  So she had to hunt for whatever could be used, buy a few meals’ worth of ingredients, some fast stuff, and hurry home to find Charlie still on the phone, vociferating, while also placating Joe about Anna’s absence. He had gotten water on to boil, so they were that far ahead. But Nick had spaced on homework and Joe was whining, and Charlie was engrossed in trying to get his boss elected president of the United States, after which things would supposedly calm back down. Aaack!
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  Oh well; time to heft Joe onto her hip and see if he would help make a salad, while consulting with Nick on math. It would all be better by the year 2500.

  Not for the first time, it struck her that things were calmer and more relaxing at work than they were at home. Or rather, that wherever she was, it always seemed like it was calmer at the other place. Was that normal? And if so, what did it mean?

  Back at work, where the calm was again not actually noticeable as such, the climate amelioration projects were still taking up the bulk of their efforts. Carbon capture and sequestration, cleaner energy sources, cleaner transport: each area by itself was massive and complex, and correlating them was really more than their systems could accomplish. Although Frank had established a model modeling group, to study ways to model their efforts as a single thing.

  Meanwhile they continued the work on their own fronts, and reported back to Diane and Laveta. Bioinformatics was still expanding at a tremendous speed, although here as elsewhere they were running into the same problem they had encountered with the climate: they knew things, but they couldn’t act on them. Getting genetically modified DNA into living humans was still proving to be an enormous obstacle.

  On the climate front, the North Atlantic project was entrained and happening, therefore out of their hands; and everywhere else, they were running into the tail-wagging-dog difficulty that Edgardo had named Fat Dog Syndrome; the dog was too fat for the tail to wag it, no matter how excited the tail got. They tried to quantify this impression by using cascade math to model ways for distributing money that would perturb other sources of it, finding capital at “high angles of repose,” venture capital, pension funds, investment banks, the stock markets, futures markets. Indeed, if they could get the markets to invest, they would really be tapping into the economy’s surplus value, redirecting it to purposes actually useful. But whether these efforts were finding anything useful in the real world was an open question.