Sixty Days and Counting sitc-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  One of the World Bank guys muttered, “But tell us what you really think,” while putting his papers in his briefcase. His companion snickered, and this gave him courage to continue: “I’m not gonna stay and listen to this,” he said.

  “That’s fine,” Charlie said. “You can leave now and get a head start on looking for a new job.”

  The man blinked hostilely at him. But he did not otherwise move.

  Charlie stared at him for a while, working to collect himself. He lowered his voice and spoke as calmly as he could manage. He outlined the basics of the new mission architecture, including the role that the World Bank was now to play; but he couldn’t handle going into detail with people who were now furious at him, and in truth had never been listening. It was time for what Frank called limited discussion. So Charlie wrapped it up, then gave them a few copies of the mission architecture outline, thick books that had been bound just that week. “Your part of the plan is here in concept. Take it back and talk it over with your people, and come to us with your plan to enact it. We look forward to hearing your ideas. I’ve got you scheduled for a meeting on the sixth of next month, and I’ll expect your report then.” Although, since we will be decapitating your organization, it won’t be you guys doing the reporting, he didn’t add.

  And he gathered his papers and left the room.

  Well, shit. What a waste of everyone’s time.

  He had been sweating, and now out on the street he chilled. His hands were shaking. He had lost it. It was amazing how angry he had gotten. Phil had told him to go in and kick ass, but it did no good to yell at people like that. It had been unprofessional; out of control; counterproductive. Only senators got to rave like that. Staffers, no.

  Well, what was done was done. Now it was time to pick up Joe and go home. Anna wouldn’t believe what he had done. In fact, he realized, he would not be able to tell her about it, not in full; she would be too appalled. She would say “Oh Charlie” and he would be ashamed of himself.

  But at least it was time to get Joe. At this point he had been at daycare for twelve hours exactly. “Damn it,” Charlie said viciously, all of a sudden as angry as he had been in the meeting; and then, glad that he had shouted at them. Years of repressed anger at the fatuous destructiveness of the World Bank and the system they worked for had been released all at once; the wonder was he had been as polite as he had. The anger still boiled in him uselessly, caustic to his own poor gut.

  Joe, however, seemed unconcerned by his long day. “Hi Dad!” he said brightly from the blocks and trucks corner, where he had the undivided attention of a young woman who reminded Charlie of their old Gymboree friend Asta. “We’re playing chess!”

  “Wow,” Charlie said, startled; but by the girl’s sweet grin, and the chess pieces strewn about the board and the floor, he saw that it was Joe’s version of chess, and the mayhem had been severe. “That’s really good, Joe! But now I’m here and it’s time, so can we help clean up and go?”

  “Okay Dad.”

  On the Metro ride home, Joe seemed tired but happy. “We had Cheerios for snack.”

  “Oh good, you like Cheerios. Are you still hungry?”

  “No, I’m good. Are you hungry, Dad?”

  “Well, yes, a little bit.”

  “Wanna cracker?” And he produced a worn fragment of a Wheat Thin from his pants pocket, dusted with lint.

  “Thanks, Joe, that’s nice. Sure, I’ll take it.” He took the cracker and ate it. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “Beggars?”

  “People who don’t have anything. People who ask you for money.”

  “Money?”

  “You know, money. The stuff people pay for things with, when they buy them.”

  “Buy them?”

  “Come on Joe. Please. It’s hard to explain what money is. Dollars. Quarters. Beggars are people who don’t have much money and they don’t have much of a way to get money. All they’ve got is the World Bank ripping their hearts out and eating their lives. So, the saying means, when you’re like a beggar, you can’t be too picky about choosing things when they’re offered to you.”

  “What about Han? Is she too picky?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Who’s Han?”

  “Han is the morning teacher. She doesn’t like bagels.”

  “I see! Well, that sounds too picky to me.”

  “Right,” Joe said. “You get what you get.”

  “That’s true,” Charlie said.

  “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit!” Joe declared, and beamed. Obviously this was a saying often repeated at the daycare. A mantra of sorts.

  “That’s very true,” Charlie said. “Although to tell you the truth, I did just throw a fit.”

  “Oh well.” Joe was observing the people getting on at the UDC stop, and Charlie looked up too. Students and workers, all going home late. “These things happen,” Joe said. He sat leaning against Charlie, his body relaxed, murmuring something to the tiny plastic soldier grasped in his fist, looking at the people in their bright-pink-seated car.

  Then they were at the Bethesda stop, and off and up the long escalator to the street, and walking down Wisconsin together with the cars roaring by.

  “Dad, let’s go in and get a cookie! Cookie!”

  It was that block’s Starbucks, one of Joe’s favorite places.

  “Oh Joe, we’ve got to get home, Mom and Nick are waiting to see us, they miss us.”

  “Sure Dad. Whatever you say Dad.”

  “Please, Joe! Don’t say that!”

  “Okay Dad.”

  Charlie shook his head as they walked on, his throat tight. He clutched Joe’s hand and let Joe swing their arms up and down.

  V. UNDECIDED

  -

  P leasure is a brain mechanism. It’s a product of natural selection, so it must help to make us more adaptive. Sexual attraction is an index of likely sexual pleasure.

  Frank stopped in his reading. Was that true?

  The introduction to this book claimed the collected sociobiological papers in it studied female sexual attractiveness exclusively because there were more data about it. Yeah right. Also, female sexual attractiveness was easier to see and describe and quantify, as it had more to do with physical qualities than with abstract attributes such as status or prowess or sense of humor. Yeah right! What about the fact that the authors of the articles were all male? Would Hrdy agree with any of these justifications? Or would she laugh outright?

  Evolutionary psychology studies the adaptations made to solve the information-processing problems our ancestors faced over the last couple million years. The problems? Find food; select habitat; stay safe; choose a mate. Obviously the brain must solve diverse problems in different domains. No general-purpose brain mechanism to solve all problems, just as no general-purpose organ to solve all physiological problems. Food choice very different from mate choice, for instance.

  Was this true? Was not consciousness itself precisely the general-purpose brain mechanism this guy claimed did not exist? Maybe it was like blood, circulating among the organs. Or the whole person as a gestalt decision maker. One decision after another.

  Anyway, mate choice: or rather, males choosing females. Sexual attraction had something to do with it. (Was this true?) Potential mates vary in mate value. Mate value could be defined as how much the mate increases reproductive success of the male making the choice. (Was this true?) Reproductive success potential can be determined by a number of variables. Information about some of these variables was available in specific observable characteristics of female bodies. Men were therefore always watching very closely. (This was true.)

  Reproductive variables: age, hormonal status, fecundity, birth history.

  A nubile female was one having begun ovulation, but never yet pregnant. Primitive population menarche average start, 12.4 years; first births at 16.8 years; peak fertility between 20 and 24 years; last births at around 40 years. In the early environment in whi
ch they evolved, women almost always were married by nubility (were they sure?). The biological fathers of women’s children were likely to be their husbands. Women started reproducing shortly after nubility, one child every three or four years, each child nursed intensively for a few years, which suppressed conception.

  A male who married a nubile female had the maximum opportunity to father her offspring during her most fecund years, and would monopolize those years from their start, thus presumably not be investing in other men’s children.

  If mate selection had been for the short term only, maximal fecundity would be preferred to nubility, because chance of pregnancy was better at that point. Sexual attraction to nubility rather than maximal fecundity indicates it was more a wife detector than a short-term, one-time mother detector.

  Was this true?

  In the early environment, female reproductive time lasted about 26 years, from 16 to 42, but this included average of 6 years of pregnancy, and 18 years of lactation. Thus females were pregnant or nursing for 24 of the relevant 26 years, or 92 percent of reproductive life. So, between first average birth age (17) and last conception age (39), average woman was nonpregnant and nonlactating for two years; thus 26 ovulations total. Say three days of fecundity per cycle, thus females were capable of conceiving on only 78 of 8,030 days, or one percent of the time. Thus only about one in a hundred random copulations could potentially result in conception.

  Did this make sense? It seemed to Frank that several parts of an algorithm had been crunched into one calculation, distorting all findings. Numbers for numbers’ sake: specifics following an averaging was one sign, “random copulations” another, because there were no such things; but that was the only way they could get the figure to be as low as one percent.

  In any case, following the argument, a nubile woman before first pregnancy was more fecund than a fully fecund woman in her early twenties, if one were considering her lifetime potential. And so nubility cues were fertility cues, as males considered their whole futures as fathers. (But did they?) Thus natural selection assigned maximum sexual attractiveness to nubility cues. And this attraction to nubility rather than fecundity indicated monogamous tendencies; male wants long-term cohabitation, with its certainty about parentage for as many offspring as possible.

  And what were nubility cues? Skin texture, muscle tone, stretch marks, breast shape, facial configuration, and waist-to-hip ratio. All these indexed female age and parity. Female sexual attractiveness varied inversely with WHR, which was lowest at nubility; higher when both younger and older. Etc. Even the face was a reliable physical indicator. (Frank laughed.) Selection showed a preference for average features. This was asserted because students in a test were asked to choose a preferred composite; the “beautiful composite,” as created by both male and female subjects, had a shorter bottom half of the face than average, typical of a twelve-year-old girl; full lips in vertical dimension, but smaller mouth than true average. Higher cheekbones than true average, larger eyes relative to face size; thinner jaw; shorter distances between nose and mouth, and between mouth and chin. High cheekbones and relatively short lower face and gracile jaw indicated youth, low testosterone/estrogen ratio, and nullipara. Bilateral symmetry was preferred. Deviation in hard tissue reduced sexual attractiveness more than the same amount of deviation in say nose form, which could have resulted from minor mishap indicating little about design quality. Ah, Francesca Taolini’s beautiful crooked nose, explained at last!

  As was “masticatory efficiency.” This was the one that had gotten Frank and Anna laughing so hard, that day when Frank had first run across the study. Sexy chewing.

  In the early environment, total body fat and health were probably correlated, so fat, what little could be accumulated, was good. Now that was reversed, and thinner meant both younger and healthier. Two possible readings, therefore, EE and modern. Which might explain why all women looked good to Frank, each in her own way. He was adaptable, he was optimodal, he was the paleolithic postmodern!

  Were women evaluating men as mates in exactly the same way? Yes; but not exactly. A woman always knew her children were biologically hers. Mate choice thus could focus on different criteria than in effect capturing all of a mate’s fecundity. Here is where the sociobiologist Hrdy had led the way, by examining and theorizing female choice.

  Patriarchy could thus be seen as a group attempt by men to be more sure of parentage, by controlling access. Men becoming jailers, men going beyond monogamy to an imprisoning polygamy, as an extension of the original adaptive logic—but an extension that was an obvious reductio ad absurdum, ending in the seraglio. Patriarchy did not eliminate male competition for mates; on the contrary, because of the reductio ad absurdum, male competition became more necessary than ever. And the more force available, the more intense the competition. Thus patriarchy as a solution to the parentage problem led to hatred, war, misogyny, gynophobia, harems, male control of reproductive rights, including anti-abortion laws (those photos of a dozen fat men grinning as they signed a law on a stage) and, ultimately, taken all in all, patriarchy led directly to the general very nonadaptive insanity that they lived in now.

  Was that true? Did sociobiology show how and why they had gone crazy as a species? Could they, using that knowledge, work backwards to sanity? Had there ever been sanity? Could they create sanity for the first time, by understanding all the insanities that had come before? By looking at adaptation and its accidental by-products, and its peacock exaggerations past the point of true function?

  And could Frank figure out what he should do about his own mating issues? It brought on a kind of nausea to be so undecided.

  -

  MOST OF THE KHEMBALIS still in the D.C. area were now moving out to their farm in Maryland. The compound was nearly finished, and although a thin layer of hard snow still lay on most of the ground, spring was springing, and they were beginning to clear the area they wanted to cultivate with crops. They rented a giant rototiller, and a little tractor of their own was on its way. Sucandra was excited. “I always wanted to be a farmer,” he said. “I dreamed about it for years, when we were in prison. Now we are going to try what crops will thrive here.” He gestured: “It looks just like it did in my dream.”

  “When the ground thaws,” Frank suggested.

  “Spring is coming. It’s almost the equinox.”

  “But growing season here starts late, doesn’t it?”

  “Not compared to Tibet.”

  “Ah.”

  Sucandra said, “Will you move out here with us, and build your treehouse?”

  “I don’t know. I need to talk it over with Rudra.”

  “He says he wants to. Qang wonders if he should stay closer to hospital.”

  “Ah. What’s wrong with him, do they know?”

  Sucandra shrugged. “Old. Worn out.”

  “I suppose.”

  “He will not stay much longer in that body.”

  Frank was startled. “Has he got something, you know—progressive?”

  Sucandra smiled. “Life is progressive.”

  “Yes.” But he’s only eighty-one, Frank didn’t say. That might be far beyond the average life span for Tibetans. He felt a kind of tightness in him.

  “I don’t know what I’ll do,” he said at last. “I mean, I’ll stay where he is. So—maybe for now I’ll just work on the treehouse, and stay in Arlington with him. If that’s okay.”

  “That would be fine, of course. Thank you for thinking of it that way.”

  Disturbed, Frank went up the hill to the copse of trees at the high point.

  He walked around in the grove, trying to concentrate. They were beautiful trees, big, old, intertwined into a canopy shading the hilltop. Snow filled every crevice of the bark on their north sides. If only they lived as long as trees. He went back to his van and got his climbing and window-washing gear, and trudged back up the hill. It was sunny but cold, a stiff west wind blowing. He knew that up in the branches it would be c
older still. He wasn’t really in the mood to climb a tree, and you needed to be in the mood. It was more dangerous than most rock climbing.

  But, however, here he was. Time to amp up and ramp up, as they used to say in the window-washing business—often before smoking huge reefers and downing extra-tall cups of 7-Eleven coffee, admittedly—but the point still held. One needed to get psyched and pay attention. Crampons, linesman’s harness, strap around, kick in, deep breath. Up, up, up!

  Eyes streaming in the cold wind. Blink several times to clear vision. Through the heavy lowest branches, up to the level under the canopy, where big branches from different trees intertwined. In the wind he could see the independent motion of all the branches. Hard to imagine, offhand, what that might mean in terms of a treehouse. If an extensive treehouse were to rest on branches from more than one tree, wouldn’t it vibrate or bounce at cross-purposes, rather than sway all of a piece, as his little Rock Creek treehouse did? An interference pattern, on the other hand, might be like living in a perpetual earthquake. Not good. What was needed was a big central room, set firmly on one big trunk in the middle, with the other rooms set independently on branches of their own—yes—much like the Swiss Family treehouse at Disneyland. He had heard it was the Tarzan treehouse now, but he wasn’t willing to accept that. Anyway the design was sound. He saw the potential branches, made a first sketch on a little pocket notebook page, hanging there. It could be good.

  And yet he wasn’t looking forward to it.

  Then he saw that the smallest branches around him were studded with tiny green buds. They were the particular light vivid green that was still new to Frank, that he had never seen in his life until the previous spring, out in Rock Creek Park: deciduous bud green. An East Coast phenomenon. The color of spring. Ah yes: spring! Could spring ever be far behind? The so-called blocked moments, the times of stasis, were never really still at all. Change was constant, whether you could see it or not. Best then to focus on the new green buds, bursting out everywhere.