It was Small Delivery Systems’ lichen. Frank saw now why Marta had been not exactly boasting, nor abashed, nor exuberant, nor defensive, but some strange mixture of all these. Because she and Eleanor were the team that had engineered this tree lichen for the Russians, manipulating the fungal part of the symbiote so that it would colonize its host trees more quickly, and then alter the lignin balance of the trees in ways that changed their metabolism. Tree lichens had always done that to their hosts for their own purposes, but these did it faster and to a greater extent. The more lignin that got banked in the tree, the better the lichen did, but also the bulkier the root system became, and this increased the net carbon drawdown of individual trees by 7 or 10 percent. Cumulatively, a very big potential drawdown indeed.
And the lichen were obviously doing well, to the point where a balance had clearly been lost. There were forests Frank had seen in Canada where moss or lichen covered most of the trunks and branches. In particular he recalled a frondy, day-glo green moss that in places was very widespread. But this lichen plated everything: trunk, branches, twigs—everything but the pine needles themselves.
Such a thorough cloaking looked harmful. A shaft of sunlight cut through the clouds at an angle and hit some trees nearby, and their cladding of lichen made them gleam like bronze trees with their needles painted green.
The Small Delivery people out there with Frank were sanguine about all this. They did not think there would be a problem. They said the trees were not in danger. They said that even if some trees died, it would only be a bit of negative feedback to counter the carbon drawdown that was already working so well. If a certain percentage of trees also took on lignin so fast they split their trunks, or had roots rupture underground, or others were suffocated by the lichen growing over the budding points of the new needles, then that would slow any further runaway growth of the lichen. Things would then eventually reach a balance.
Frank wasn’t so sure. He did not think this was ecologically sound. Possibly the lichen could go on living on dead trees; certainly it could spread at the borders of the infestation to new trees. But these were not the people to talk to about this possibility.
The new lichen started out khaki, it appeared, and then caked itself with a second layer that was the dull bronze that eventually dominated. Like the cructose lichen of the high Sierra that you saw everywhere on granite, it was quite beautiful. The little bubbles of its surface texture had an insectile sheen. That was the fungus. Frank recalled a passage in Thoreau: “The simplest and most lumpish fungus has a peculiar interest to us, because it is so obviously organic and related to ourselves; matter not dormant, but inspired, a life akin to my own. It is a successful poem in its kind.”
Which was true; but to see it take over the life it was usually symbiotic with was not a good thing. It looked like the parts of Georgia where kudzu had for a time overgrown everything.
“Creepy,” Frank remarked, scraping at an individual bubble with a finger-nail. These were the tiny plutons of a different kind of batholith.
“Yes, it is kind of, isn’t it?”
“How do the roots look?”
“Come see for yourself.” They took him to an area where the soil had been removed from beneath some sample trees. Here they saw both before and after roots, as some trees had been girdled and killed and their roots exposed later, to give them baseline data. Near them some still living trees, or trees in the process of being killed by the root exposure, were standing in holes balanced on their lowest net of fine roots, leaving most of the root balls exposed. The root balls were still shallow, in the way of evergreens, but the lichen-infested trees had roots that were markedly thicker than the uninfested trees.
“We started by treating an area of about a thousand square kilometers, and now it’s about five thousand.”
“About the size of Delaware, in other words.”
Meaning some tens of millions of trees had been affected, and thus in the neighborhood of tens of millions of tons of carbon drawn down. Say a hundred million tons for the sake of thinking—that was about one percent of what they had put into the atmosphere in the year since the lichen was released.
Of course if it killed the forest, a lot of that carbon would then be eaten by microbes and respired to the atmosphere, some of it quickly, some over years, some over decades. This, Frank’s hosts assured him, given the situation they were in, was a risk worth taking. It was not a perfect nor a completely safe solution, but then again, none of them were.
Interesting to hear this reckless stuff coming from the Russians and the Small Delivery Systems people about equally, Frank thought. Who had persuaded whom was probably irrelevant; now it was a true folie à deux.
He had stood a thousand feet tall on the floor of the Atlantic; now it looked like he had been miniaturized, and was threading his way through a forest of mold in a Petri dish. “Really creepy,” he declared.
Certainly time to declare limited discussion. It was impossible to tease out the ramifications of all this, they depended so heavily on what happened to the various symbioses feeding each other, eating each other. There would need to be some kind of Kenzo modeling session, in which the whole range of possibilities got mapped, then the probabilities of each assessed. Feedback on feedback. It was very possibly incalculable, something they could only find out by watching what happened in real time, real space. Like history itself. History in the making, right out there in the middle of Siberia.
Then it was on to London, by way of Moscow, which he did not see at all. In his London hotel after the flights, he was jetlagged into some insomniac limbo, and could not sleep. It felt strange to have such a big bed at his command, and a room—oppressive, even decadent.
He checked his e-mail and then the internet. His browser’s home page news had a little item about Phil Chase and Diane opening a National Academy of Sciences meeting together. He smiled ruefully, almost a grimace, and clicked to Emerson, where a search using the word traveling brought up this:
Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
From “Self-Reliance.” Frank laughed, then showered and went to bed, and in the midst of his giant’s weary buzzing, the luxury of lying horizontally suddenly took him away.
The conference he was attending was being held in Greenwich, near the Observatory, so that they could inspect in person, as an integral part of the conference, the Thames River Barrier. Witness the nature of the beast. The barrier was up permanently these days, forming a strangely attractive dam, composed of modular parts raised up from the river bottom, in a curve like a longbow. Ribbed arcs. One could walk out onto the first part of the broad concrete crescent, and from there it was very obvious to the eye that the seaward side, still a river, but opening like a funnel outward into the broader Thames estuary, was a plane of water distinctly higher than the plane of water on the London side. It was the opposite of the usual reservoir view, and reminded Frank of the walk he had taken with the Quiblers on the dike of Khembalung, right before the monsoon had returned and drowned the island.
Now he walked in that deracinated state characteristic of profound jetlag: sandy-eyed, mouth hung open in sleepy amazement, prone to sudden jolts of emotion. It was not particularly cold out, but the wind was raw; that was what kept him awake. When the group went back inside and took up the work on the sea-level issues, he fell asleep, unfortunately missing most of a talk he had really wanted to see, on the latest satellite-based laser altimetry measurements. An entire fleet of satellites and university and government departments had taken on the task of me
asuring sea level worldwide. Right before Frank fell asleep, the speaker said something about the sea-level rise slowing down lately, meaning their first pumping efforts might be having an effect, because other measurements showed the polar melting was continuing apace, in a feedback loop many considered unstoppable. This was fascinating, but Frank fell asleep anyway.
When he woke up he was chagrined, but realized he could see the paper online. The general upshot of the talk seemed to have been that they could only really stem the rise by drawing down enough CO2 to get the atmosphere back to around 250 parts per million, levels last seen in the Little Ice Age from 1200–1400 AD. People were murmuring about the nerviness of the speaker’s suggestion that they try for an ice age, but as was said immediately in rejoinder, they could always burn some carbon to warm things if they got too cold. This was another reason to bank some of the oil that remained unburned.
“I can tell you right now my wife’s going to want you to set the thermostat higher,” someone prefaced his question, to general guffaws. They all seemed much more confident of humanity’s terraforming abilities than seemed warranted. It was a research crowd rather than a policy crowd, and so included a lot of graduate students and younger professors. The more weathered faces in the room were looking around and catching each other’s eye, then raising their eyebrows.
On the flight back from London, Frank saw that the plane had telephones in the back of the middle seats, and when he spotted the tip of the astonishing icescape that was Greenland, it occurred to him to give Wade Norton another call. He punched in the number, waited. Soon he would be talking to an acquaintance in Antarctica, while flying thirty thousand feet over the tip of Greenland. The technological sublime could be so trippy.
Wade picked up. “Hi Frank. Where are you?”
“I’m in an airliner going from London to New York, and I can see the tip of Greenland, and it still looks icy. It looks the same as always.”
“You need lasers to see the difference, except in certain fjords.”
“Is that the way it is down there too? Can you see the differences down there?”
“Well, the Ross Ice Shelf being gone is the main thing you can see. There’s still lots of ice on the land. And more all the time because of us, right?”
“Right, is that still going well?”
“Yes it is. There’s some maintenance to be done at the intakes, but by and large the prototypes are all pumping away, and they’re set to add more next season. They’re talking cubic kilometer this and cubic kilometer that—they’ve sure ramped up from gallons and cubic feet per second, did you notice?”
“Yeah sure. They had to—it was getting to be like Italian lira.”
“That’s right. Also, if you take away a few zeroes it doesn’t look out of control.”
“That’s true. Maybe that’s why the modelers at this conference were so confident we had some chance of climate stabilization.”
“Maybe so. Maybe they need to come down here and see some of the tabular bergs coming off.”
“Do you think just having that experience would change their calculations though?”
“Well, good question. But I think a lot of calculations are really trying to quantify certain assumptions, don’t you? Like in economics? Not as bad as that, of course, but still.”
“Maybe we can arrange for a conference in McMurdo.”
“Good idea! I mean, NSF would probably hate it, but maybe not. It might be good publicity. Good for the budget.”
“I’ll check with Diane about it.”
“Good. Hey, how’s it going with her?”
“Good. She and Phil seem good for each other.”
“Ah yeah, that’s nice. Phil needed someone.”
“Diane too. So hey, how’s it going with Val again?”
“Ah, well, good, good. Good when I see her. I’ll see her again in about a month.”
“Whoah. So, is she off with…?”
“Yes, I think she’s with X, for part of that time, anyway. She’s with some kind of polar cap sailing village.”
“What did you say?”
“Tents on big sleds, like catamarans. They put up sails when the wind is right and move around.”
“Like iceboats?”
“Yes, like that I guess, but they’re like big rafts, and there’s a little camp’s worth of them, moving around together.”
“Wow, that sounds interesting.”
“Yeah, they’re like Huck Finn on the ice cap.”
“So—but it’s going well when you see her.”
“Oh yeah. Sure. I can’t wait.”
“And the, the other guy?”
“I like X. We get along well. I mean, we’re friends. We don’t talk about Val, that’s understood. But other than that we’re like any other friends. We understand each other. We don’t talk about it, but we understand.”
“Interesting!” Frank said, frowning. “It’s—kind of hard to imagine.”
“I don’t even try. That’s part of how it works.”
“I see.” Though he didn’t.
“You know how it is,” Wade said. “When you’re in love, you take what you can get.”
“Ahhh.”
His plane landed at JFK in the midmorning, and after that Frank had scheduled in a layover of several hours before his commuter pop down to D.C. The plan had puzzled the woman in the White House travel office, but he had only said, “I have some business in New York that day.”
Now he got in a taxi and gave the driver the address of a YMCA in Brooklyn. He sat back in the back seat and watched the infinite city flow by outside the window. It went on and on. Frank felt dumbstruck with jetlag, but as the taxi driver pulled up to the curb, next to yet another block-long five-story building, he was also curiously tense.
The chess tournament was taking place in a gym that had room for only one basketball court and a single riser of stands. Stale old-locker smell. There was a pretty good crowd in the stands.
Frank climbed the metal stairs to the top riser and sat down behind a couple of guys wearing Yankees caps. For some reason he didn’t want to be seen. He only wanted to see—
Down there at one of the tables, Chessman was playing a girl. Frank shuddered with surprise, startled by the sight even though he had been (mostly) expecting it. Clifford Archer, the tournament website had said, under-sixteen level, etc. It had seemed like it had to be him.
And there he was. He looked a bit older and taller, and was wearing a checked shirt with a button-down collar. Frank felt himself grinning; the youth held the same hunched position over this game that he had had at the picnic tables.
Maybe he had moved up here with family, as Deirdre had guessed. Or was doing it on his own somehow, following his chess destiny.
Every game in progress was represented as a schematic on a screen set up at the far end of the room, and after Frank identified Chessman’s game he could follow its progress move by move. In his jetlagged state and his low level of expertise he found it hard to judge how the game was going; they were in an odd configuration, somewhere in the mid-game, Chessman playing black and seeming to be pushed to the edges a bit more than was usual for him, or safe.
Frank studied the game, trying to get what Chessman was up to. It reminded him sharply of the long winter, when he had first met the bros, and built his treehouse. He hadn’t cared then what happened in the games. Now he was rooting for Chessman, but in ignorance. The two players had both lost about the same number and strength of pieces.
Then the girl took one of Chessman’s bishops, but it was a sacrifice (Frank hadn’t seen it) and after that Chessman’s trap was revealed. He had her in a pincer movement of sorts, although she had a lot of pieces in the middle.
The men sitting on the riser just below him were murmuring about this, it seemed. Frank leaned forward and said in a low voice, with a gesture:
“Is that young man doing well?”
They both nodded, without looking back at him. One muttered
from the side of his mouth, “He’s very patient.”
The other one nodded. “He plays black even when he’s playing white. He’s like good at waiting. He’s going to win this one, and she’s a junior master.”
And though Frank couldn’t see it, they were right. Chessman made a move, hit his timer and leaned back. The girl scowled and resigned, shook hands with Clifford, smiling crookedly, and went to rejoin her coach for a postmortem.
Chessman stood. No one joined him, and he was not looking around. He walked over to the officials’ table, and some of the people standing there congratulated him. Frank stood, walked down the stairs to the floor of the gym, crossed the court, and approached the officials’ table. He paused when he saw the youth in conversation with someone there, talking chess, it was clear. Chessman was animated, even cheerful. There was a look on his face that Frank had never seen before. Frank stopped in his tracks. He hesitated, watching. Finally he turned and left the gym.
-
THE NEXT DAY FRANK RAN WITH EDGARDO, and told him about his trip, and then said to him, “You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said about Caroline, and I’ve tried contacting her by getting into her surveillance, and it hasn’t worked, and I’m getting scared. And it occurred to me that maybe your friends might be in some sort of contact with her, if what you said happened to be the case, and if so, that they might be able to tell her that I really, really want to see her. I need to see her, if it’s at all possible. Because otherwise it’s just too…well. I’m scared is the thing.”
“Yes, yes yes yes yes,” Edgardo said, as if pooh-poohing the idea; and then he went silent, as if thinking it over; and then he made no other response at all, but as they made the turn under the Lincoln Memorial, changed the subject to the difficulties that Chase was having with Congress.
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