Sixty Days and Counting

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  They conversed in Spanish:

  “So?”

  “We’re still looking into ways of isolating these guys.”

  “Is she still helping?”

  “Yes, she’s the decoy while we try to cut these guys out. She’s playing the shell game with them.”

  “And you think Cooper is the leader?”

  “Not sure about that. He may have a stovepipe that goes pretty high. That’s one of the things we’re still trying to determine.”

  “But he’s part of ARDA?”

  “Yes.”

  “And where did they relocate that most exciting program?”

  “There’s a working group, suspended between Homeland Security and the National Security Council. ARDA prime.”

  Edgardo laughed. He danced a little tango step while singing the bitter wild riff at the start of “Primavera Porteño.” “They are so fucking stupid, my friend! Could it get any more byzantine?”

  “That’s the point. It’s a work of art.”

  “It’s a fucking shambles. They must be scared out of their wits, granting they ever had any wits, which I don’t. I mean if they get caught…”

  “It will be hard to catch them outright. I think the best we can do is cut them out. But if they see that coming, they will fight.”

  “I’m sure. Is all of ARDA in on it?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “That’s good. I know some of those guys from my time at DARPA. I liked them. Some of them, anyway.”

  “I know. I’m sure the ones you liked are all innocent of this.”

  “Right.” Edgardo laughed. “Well, fuck them. What should I tell Frank?”

  “Tell him to hang in there.”

  “Do you think it would be okay to tip him that his girlfriend is still involved in a root canal?”

  “I don’t know.” Umberto sucked on his cigarette, blew out a long plume of white smoke. “Not if you think he’ll do anything different.”

  A LL FRANK COULD THINK ABOUT NOW was how he could get in touch with Caroline. Apparently showing up in her surveillance of her ex had not worked; there was no way of telling why. Surely she had motion checkers to flag intrusions or appearances or changes that she needed to check. That was the way surveillance cameras worked; you couldn’t just film real time and watch it later, there was never the time for that. And so…

  Something must be wrong.

  He could go to Mount Desert Island. He thought there was a good chance that Edgardo was right about her staying up there. It was a big island, and she had obviously loved it; her idea of what hiding out meant was tied to that place. And if she kept a distance from her friend’s camp, kept to herself somewhere else on the island, her ex would assume she had bolted elsewhere (unless he didn’t) and she would be able to lie low.

  But in that case, how would Frank find her?

  What would she have to have? What would she not stop doing? Shopping for food? Getting espressos? Bicycling?

  He wasn’t really sure; he didn’t know her well enough to say. She had said there was great mountain biking to be had on the gravel carriage roads that wound around the granite knobs on the eastern half of the island, on which you could bike with no one seeing you, except for other bikers. Did that mean he should go up and rent a mountain bike and ride around on this network, or hang out at the backwoods intersections of these gravel roads, and wait for her to pass by accident? No. It took a long time to drive up there and back. If you couldn’t fly you had to drive. But there was so much else going on down in D.C., and even elsewhere around the world; he needed to go to San Diego again, he needed to visit London, it would be good to see that site in Siberia, even get to Antarctica and visit Wade if he could.

  On the other hand, his tree had been cut down, his battery cables cut, his kayak wrecked, his computer destroyed. He had to deal with it somehow. It was in his face and in his thoughts. He had to do something.

  But instead of doing something, he sat in the garden at the farm, and weeded. He woke up at dawn to find Rudra at the window, looking out at the river. Quicksilver slick under gray mist streamers. Trees on the far bank looking like ghosts.

  He helped Rudra with his morning English lessons. Rudra was working from a primer prepared under the tutelage of the Dalai Lama, and used to teach the Tibetan-speaking children their English:

  “ ‘There are good anchors to reality and bad anchors to reality. Try to avoid the bad ones.’ Ha!” Rudra snorted. “Thanks for such wisdom, oh High Holiness! Look, he even calls them the Four Bad D’s. It’s like the Chinese, they are always Four Thises and Six Thats.”

  “The Eight Noble Truths?” Frank said.

  “Bah. That’s Chinese Buddhism.”

  “Interesting. And what exactly are the Four Bad D’s?”

  “Debt, depression, disease, death.”

  “Whoah. Those are four bad D’s, all right. Are there four good D’s?”

  “Children, health, work, love.”

  “Man you are a sociobiologist. Could you add habits, maybe?”

  “No. Number very important. Only room for four.”

  Frank laughed. “But it’s such a good anchor. It’s what allows you to love your life. You love your habits the way you love your home. As a kind of gravity that includes other emotions. Even hate.”

  Rudra shrugged. “I am an exile.”

  “Me too.”

  Rudra looked at him. “You can move back to your home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you are not an exile. You are just not at home.”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  “Why would you not move home if you could?”

  “Work?” Frank said.

  But it was a good question.

  That night, as they were falling asleep in the ever-so-slightly-rocking dark of their suspended room, the wind rustling the leaves of the grove, Frank came back to the morning’s conversation.

  “I’ve been thinking about good correlations. We need a numbered list of those. My good correlation is the one between living as close to a prehistoric life as you can, and being happy, and becoming more healthy, and reducing your consumption and therefore your impact on the planet. That’s a very good correlation. Then Phil Chase had another one at his inaugural. He talked about how social justice and women’s rights correlate with a steady-state replacement rate for the population, which would mean the end of rapid population growth, and thus reduce our load on the planet. That’s another very good correlation. So, I’m thinking of calling them the Two Good Correlations.”

  “Two is not enough.”

  “What?”

  “Two is not a big enough number for this kind of thing. There is never the Two This or the Two That. You need at least three, maybe more.”

  “But I only know two.”

  “You must think of some more.”

  “Okay, sure.” Frank was falling asleep. “You have to help me though. The question will be, what’s the third good correlation?”

  “That’s easy.”

  “What?”

  “You think about it.”

  For some reason no one was hanging out at Site 21 these days. Maybe the heat and the mosquitoes. Back at the farm Frank yanked weeds out of the garden rows. He cut the grass of the lawn with a hand scythe, swinging it like a golf club, viciously driving shot after shot out to some distant green. At night in the dining room he ate at the end of a table, reading, bathed in a sea of Tibetan voices. Sometimes he would talk to Padma or Sucandra, then go to bed and read his laptop for a while. He missed the bros and their rowdy assholery. It occurred to him one night in the dining hall that not only was bad company better than no company, there were times when bad company was better than good company. But it was a different life now.

  At work, Frank was passing along some great projects for Diane to propose to the president. The converter that could be put in all new cars so that they could run on eighty-five percent ethanol could in a different form be added
to already existing cars, like smog-control devices had been. Legislating that as a requirement would immediately change their fuel needs, and overwhelm their limited ability to make ethanol, but Brazil had shown it could be ramped up pretty fast. And there were advances on that front coming out of RRCCES, another offshoot of Eleanor’s work, carried forward by other colleagues of hers, in which an engineered enzyme allowed them to get away from corn and start to use wood chips for their ethanol feed stock, and might soon allow them to use grass; that biotech accomplishment was another kind of holy grail.

  Burning ethanol still released carbon to the atmosphere, of course, but the difference was that this was carbon that had only recently been drawn down from the atmosphere by plant growth, and when they grew more feedstock, carbon would be drawn down again, so that it was almost a closed loop, with human transport as part of the cycle. As opposed to releasing the fossil carbon that had been so nicely sequestered under the ground in the form of oil and coal.

  On that front too there were interesting developments. Clean coal had, up until this point, only meant burning coal and capturing the particulate load released to the atmosphere. That was called clean, but it was a strange issue, because the particulates were probably lofting into the high atmosphere and reflecting sunlight away, creating at least part of the so-called “global dimming,” meaning the lower levels of sunlight that had been reaching the surface of the Earth in the last few decades compared to when it had first been measured. So that cleaning up coal burning in that way might actually let more light through and add to the global warming overall.

  As for the carbon dioxide released when coal was burned, that had not been a part of what they had been calling clean coal. But now their prototype plant’s blueprint included a complete plan for burning coal and capturing both carbon dioxide and particulates before release. None of the elements were speculative; all existed already and could be combined. It would be expensive; it would mean that each coal-burning power plant would become a complicated and expensive factory. But so what? It could be argued that this was only another advantage for the manufacturers of such plants. Public utilities, private investors, ultimately it didn’t matter; it had to be done, it had to be paid for, someone would get paid when society made the payment. It was simply work to be done.

  Meanwhile, on another front, captured carbon dioxide was being injected into depleted oil wells. Compressed and frozen, the dry ice was put under pressure until it flowed down old oil pipes and filled the pores of rock that had been drained of its oil. They were doing it in Canada, off Norway in the North Sea, and they were now starting to do it in Texas. Putting the carbon dioxide down there both sequestered it nicely, for thousands of years at least, and also put more pressure on the remaining oil deposits, making them easier to pump up. Because even if they stopped burning oil, they still needed it as the feed-stock for plastics and pesticides. They would still be wearing it and eating it; they would just stop burning it.

  All these projects were pouring into NSF and Energy and many other federal agencies and being screened by Diane’s committee and placed into the mission architecture that indicated what they needed all up and down the structure of their new technology. There were very few weak points or question marks in this architecture! They could swap out power and transport in less than ten years!

  But even if they stabilized carbon emissions immediately, even if they were to stop burning carbon entirely, which was a theoretical possibility only, for the sake of calculation, global temperatures would continue to rise for many years. The continuity effect, as they called it, and a nasty problem to contemplate. It was an open question whether temperatures even in the best case scenario would rise enough to cross the threshhold to further positive feedbacks that would cause it to rise even more. Models were not at all precise on this subject.

  So they had to continue to discuss the ocean problems, among many others. In one meeting, Diane asked Frank about the Sample Basin Study that was looking into flooding dry lake basins, and Frank called up an e-mail from the P.I.

  Frank said, “China likes the idea. They say they’ve already done similar things, at Three Gorges of course, but also at four more dams like Three Gorges. Those are mostly for hydroelectric and flood control, and they’re seeing climate effects downwind, but they feel they’ve got experience with the process, and say they would be willing to take more. And the biggest basins on Earth are all theirs.”

  “But, salt water?”

  “Any lake helps cloud formation, so they would be hydrating the deserts downwind by precipitating out.”

  “Still, it’s hard to imagine them sacrificing that much land.”

  “True. But clearly there’s going to be something like carbon cap credits set up. Some kind of sea water credits, given to countries for taking up sea water. Maybe even combine it with carbon trading, so that taking up sea water earns carbon credits. Or funding for desalination plants on the basin’s new shorelines. Or whatever. Some kind of compensation.”

  Diane said, “I suppose we could arrange a treaty with them.”

  Later they worked on the Antarctic aspect of the plan. The dry basins of the world didn’t have enough capacity to keep sea level in place anyway, so they needed to push the Antarctic idea too. If that ended up working, then in theory the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet would be able to handle all possible excess, and the dry basins up north would only be filled if the net effects of doing so looked good to the host country.

  “Sounds good. But it’s a lot of water.”

  That night Frank walked out of the security gate on 17th Street, at the south end of the Old Executive Offices, and across the street there was a woman standing as if waiting for the light to change. His heart pounded in his chest like a child trying to escape. He stared—was it really her?

  She nodded, jerked her head sideways: follow me. She walked up to G Street and Frank did too, on the other side of the street. His pulse was flying. An amazing physical response—well, but she had been out of touch and now there she was, her face so vivid, so distinctly hers, leaping out of reality into his mind. Oh my, oh my. She must have seen his jump through her surveillance camera, or heard his mental call. So often telepathy seemed real. Or maybe she had been discovered, and forced to go on the run again. In need of his help. It could be anything.

  A red light stopped him. She had stopped too, and was not crossing with the green to him. Apparently they were to walk in parallel for a while, west on G Street. It was a long light. If you felt each second fully, a lifetime would become an infinity. Maybe that was the point of being in love, or the reward. Oh my. He could feel the knock of his heart in the back of his nose. He followed her down G Street, past the Watergate complex, and across the Parkway, through the boating center parking lot, down into the trees at the mouth of Rock Creek, where finally they could converge, could crash into each other’s arms and hug each other hard, hard, hard. Ah God, his partner in exile, his fellow refugee from reality, here at last, as real as a rock in his hands.

  “What’s up?” he said, his voice rough, out of his control. Only now did he feel just how scared he had been for her. “I’ve been scared!” he complained. “Look—I have to have a way to get in touch with you, I just have to. We have to have a drop box or something, some way to do it. I can’t stand it when we don’t. I can’t stand it anymore!”

  She pulled back, surprised at his vehemence. “Sorry. I’ve been working out my routines, figuring out what I can do and what I can’t. They’re still after me, and I wasn’t totally sure I could stay off their radar, and so—I didn’t want to get you caught up in anything.”

  “I already am caught up in it. I am fully caught up in it!”

  “Okay, okay. I know. But I had to make sure we were both clear. And usually you’re not. They know about that Khembalung embassy house, and their place in Maryland too.”

  “I know! They know all that! What about now? Am I clear?”

  She took a wand out of her
pocket, ran it over him. “Right now you are. It happens most often right when you leave work. The chips are mostly in stuff you leave at your other places. But I had to see you. I needed to see you.”

  “Well good.” Then he saw on her face how she felt, and his spirits ballooned: at this first flash of reciprocation, the feeling blazed up in him again. Love was like a laser beam bouncing between two mirrors. She smiled at the look on his face, then they embraced and started to kiss, and Frank was swept away in a great wave of passion, like a wave catching him up in the ocean. Off they went in it, but it was more than passion, something bigger and more coherent, a feeling for her, his Caroline—an overwhelming feeling. “Oh my,” he said over her shoulder.

  She laughed, trembling in his arms. They hugged again, harder than ever. He was in love and she was in love and they were in love with each other. Kissing was a kind of orgasm of the feelings. He was breathing heavily, and she was too—heart pounding, blood pulsing. Frank ran a hand through her hair, feeling the tight curl, the thick springiness of it. She tilted her head back into the palm of his hand, giving herself to him.

  They were in a dark knot of trees. They sat on the previous year’s mat of leaves, burrowed into them as they kissed. A lot of time was lost then, it rushed past or did not happen. Her muscles were hard and her soft spots were soft. She murmured, she hummed, she moved without volition against him.

  After a while she laughed again, shook her head as if to clear it. “Let’s go somewhere and talk,” she said. “We’re not that well hidden here.”

  “True.” In fact the Rock Creek Parkway, above them through the trees, was busy with cars, and in the other direction they could see a few of the lights of the Georgetown riverfront, blinking through branches.

  When they were standing again she took his face in both hands and squeezed it. “I need you, Frank.”

  “I knee woo too,” he said, lips squeezed vertically.

  She laughed and let his face go. “Come on, let’s go get a drink,” she said. “I’ve got to tell you some stuff.”