Sixty Days and Counting

-

Why do you do what you do?

I guess because we still kind of believe that the world can be saved. We? The people where you work?

Yes. Not all of them. But most. Scientists are like that. I mean, we’re seeing evidence that we seem to be starting a mass extinction event.

What’s that?

A time when lots of species are killed off by some change in the environment. Like when that meteor struck and killed off the dinosaurs.

So people hit Earth like meteor.

Yes. It’s getting to be that way for a lot of the big mammals especially. We’re in the last moments already for a lot of them.

No more tigers.

That’s right. No more lots of things. So…most of the scientists I know seem to think we ought to limit the extinctions to a minimum. Just to keep the lab working, so to speak.

The Frank Principle.

(Laughs.) I guess. Some people at work call it that. Who told you that?

Drepung tell me. Saving world so science can proceed. The Frank Principle.

Right. Well—it’s like Buddhism, right? You might as well try to make a better world.

Yes. So, your National Science Foundation—very Buddhist!

Ha ha. I don’t know if I’d go that far. NSF is mostly pragmatic. They have a job to do and a budget to do it with. A rather small budget.

But a big name! National—Science—Foundation. Foundation means base, right? Base of house?

Yes. It is a big name. But I don’t think they regard themselves as particularly big. Nor particularly Buddhist. Compassion and right action are not their prime motivation.

Compassion! So what? Does it matter why, if we do good things?

I don’t know. Does it?

Maybe not!

Maybe not.

-

BY THE TIME PHIL CHASE WAS ELECTED president, the world’s climate was already far along the way to irrevocable change. There were already four hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and another hundred parts would be there soon if civilization continued to burn its fossil carbon—and at this point there was no other option. Just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in the midst of a crisis that in some ways worsened before it got better, they were entangled in a moment of history when climate change, the destruction of the natural world, and widespread human misery were combining in a toxic and combustible mix. The new president had to contemplate drastic action while at the same time being constrained by any number of economic and political factors, not least the huge public debt left deliberately by the administrations preceding him.

It did not help that the weather that winter careened wildly from one extreme to another, but was in the main almost as cold as the previous record-breaking year. Chase joked about it everywhere he went: “It’s ten below zero, aren’t you glad you elected me? Just think what it would have been like if you hadn’t!” He would end speeches with a line from the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley:

“O, Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

“Maybe it can,” Kenzo pointed out with a grin. “We’re in the Youngest Dryas, after all.”

In any case, it was a fluky winter—above all windy—and the American people were in an uncertain state of mind. Chase addressed this: “The only thing we have to fear,” he would intone, “is abrupt climate change!”

He would laugh, and people would laugh with him, understanding him to be saying that there was indeed something real to fear, but that they could do something about it.

His transition team worked with an urgency that resembled desperation. Sea level was rising; temperatures were rising; there was no time to lose. Chase’s good humor and casual style were therefore welcomed, when they were not reviled—much as it had been with FDR in the previous century. He would say, “We got ourselves into this mess and we can get out of it. The problems create an opportunity to remake our relationship to nature, and create a new dispensation. So—happy days are here again! Because we’re making history, we are seizing the planet’s history, I say, and turning it to the good.”

Some scoffed; some listened and took heart; some waited to see what would happen.

As far as Frank Vanderwal’s personal feelings were concerned, there was something reassuring about the world being so messed up. It tended to make his own life look like part of a trend, and a small part at that. A hill of beans in this world. Perhaps even so small as to be manageable.

Although, to tell the truth, it didn’t feel that way. There were reasons to be very concerned, almost to the edge of fear. Frank’s friend Caroline had disappeared on election night, chased by armed agents of some superblack intelligence agency. She had stolen her husband’s plan to steal the election, and Frank had passed this plan to a friend at NSF with intelligence contacts, to what effect he could not be sure. He had helped her to escape her pursuers. To do that he had had to break a date with another friend, his boss and a woman he loved—although what that meant, given the passionate affair he was carrying on with Caroline, he did not know. There was a lot he didn’t know; and he could still taste blood at the back of his throat, months after his nose had been broken. He could not think for long about the same thing. He was living a life that he called parcellated, but others might call dysfunctional: i.e., semi-homeless in Washington, D.C. He could have been back home in San Diego by now, where his teaching position was waiting for him. Instead he was a temporary guest of the embassy of the drowned nation of Khembalung. But hey, everyone had problems! Why should he be any different?

Although brain damage would be a little more than different. Brain damage meant something like—mental illness. It was a hard phrase to articulate when thinking about oneself. But it was possible his injury had exacerbated a lifelong tendency to make poor decisions. It was hard to tell. He had thought all his recent decisions had been correct, after all, in the moment he had made them. Should he not have faith that he was following a valid line of thought? He wasn’t sure.

Thus it was a relief to think that all these personal problems were as nothing compared to the trouble all life on Earth now faced as a functioning biosphere. There were days in which he welcomed the bad news, and he saw that other people were doing the same. As this unpredictable winter blasted them with cold or bathed them in Caribbean balm, there grew in the city a shared interest and good cheer, a kind of solidarity.

Frank felt this solidarity also on the premises of the National Science Foundation, where he and many of his colleagues were trying to deal with the climate problem. To do so, they had to keep trying to understand the environmental effects of:

1) the so-far encouraging but still ambiguous results of their North Atlantic salting operation;

2) the equally ambiguous proliferation of a genetically modified “fast tree lichen” that had been released by the Russians in the Siberian forest;

3) the ongoing rapid detachment and flotation of the coastal verge of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet;

4) the ongoing introduction of about nine billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, ultimate source of many other problems;

5) the ensuing uptake of some three billion tons of carbon into the oceans;

6) the continuing rise of the human population by some hundred million people a year; and, last,

7) the cumulative impacts of all these events, gnarled together in feedback loops of all kinds.

It was a formidable list, and Frank worked hard on keeping his focus on it.

But he was beginning to see that his personal problems—especially Caroline’s disappearance, and the election-tampering scheme she had been tangled in—were not going to be things he could ignore. They pressed on his mind.

She had called the Khembali embassy that night, and left a message saying that she was okay. Earlier, in Rock Creek Park, she had told him she would be in touch as soon as she could.

He had therefore been waiting for that contact, he told himself. But it had not come. And Caroline’s ex, who had also been her boss, had been following her that night. Her ex had seen that Caroline knew he was following her, and had seen also that Caroline had received help in escaping from him. He also knew that Caroline’s help had thrown a big rock right at his head.

So now this man might very well still be looking for her, and might also be looking for that help she had gotten, as another way of hunting for her.

Or so it seemed. Frank couldn’t be sure. He sat at his desk at NSF, staring at his computer screen, trying to think it through. He could not seem to do it. Whether it was the difficulty of the problem, or the inadequacy of his mentation, he could not be sure; but he could not do it.

So he went to see Edgardo. He entered his colleague’s office and said, “Can we talk about the election result? What happened that night, and what might follow?”

“Ah! Well, that will take some time to discuss. And we were going to run today anyway. Let’s talk about it while en route.”

Frank took the point: no sensitive discussions to take place in their offices. Surveillance an all-too-real possibility. Frank had been on Caroline’s list of surveilled subjects, and so had Edgardo.

In the locker room on the third floor they changed into running clothes. At the end of that process Edgardo took from his locker a security wand that resembled those used in airports; Caroline had used one like it. Frank was startled to see it there inside NSF, but nodded silently and allowed Edgardo to run it over him. Then he did the same for Edgardo.

They appeared to be clean of devices.

Then out on the streets.

As they ran, Frank said, “Have you had that thing for long?”

“Too long, my friend.” Edgardo veered side to side as he ran, warming up his ankles in his usual extravagant manner. “But I haven’t had to get it out for a while.”

“Don’t you worry that having it there looks odd?”

“No one notices things in the locker room.”

“Are our offices bugged?”

“Yes. Yours, anyway. The thing you need to learn is that coverage is very spotty, just by the nature of the activity. The various agencies that do this have different interests and abilities, and very few even attempt total surveillance. And then only for crucial cases. Most of the rest is what you might call statistical in nature, and covers different parts of the datasphere. You can slip in and out of such surveillance.”

“But—these so-called total information awareness systems, what about them?”

“It depends. Mostly by total information they mean electronic data. And then also you might be chipped in various ways, which would give your GPS location, and perhaps record what you say. Followed, filmed—sure, all that’s possible, but it’s expensive. But now we’re clear. So tell me what’s up?”

“Well—like I said. About the election results, and that program I gave you. From my friend. What happened?”

Edgardo grinned under his mustache. “We foxed that program. We forestalled it. You could say that we un-stole the vote in Oregon, right in the middle of the theft.”

“We did?”

“Apparently so. The program was a stochastic tilt engine that had been installed in some of Oregon and Washington’s voting machines. My friends figured that out and managed to write a disabler, and to get it introduced at the very last minute, so there wasn’t any time for the people who had installed the tilter to react to the change. From the sound of it, a very neat operation.”

Frank ran along feeling a glow spread through him as he tried to comprehend it. Not only the election, de-rigged and made honest—not only Phil Chase elected by a cleaned-up popular and electoral vote—but his Caroline had proved true. She had risked herself and come through for the country; for the world, really. And so—

Maybe she would come through for him too.

This train of thought led him through the glow to a new little flood of fear for her.

Edgardo saw at least some of this on his face, apparently, for he said, “So your friend is the real thing, eh?”

“Yes.”

“It could get tricky for her now,” Edgardo suggested. “If the tweakers try to find the leakers. As we used to say at DARPA.”

“Yeah,” Frank said, his pulse rate rising at the thought.

“You’ve sent a warning?”

“I would if I could.”

“Ah!” Edgardo was nodding. “Gone away, has she?”

“Yes,” Frank said; and then it was all pouring out of him, the whole story of how they had met and what had followed. This was something he had never managed to do with anyone, not even Rudra or Anna, and now it felt as if some kind of hydrostatic pressure had built up inside him, his silence like a dam that had now failed and let forth a flood.

It took a few miles to tell. The meeting in the stuck elevator, the unsuccessful hunt for her, the sighting of her on the Potomac during the flood, the brief phone call with her—her subsequent call—their meetings, their—affair.

And then, her revealing the surveillance program she was part of, in which Frank and so many others, including Edgardo, were being tracked and evaluated in some kind of virtual futures market, wherein investors, some of them computer programs, were making speculative investments, as in any other futures markets, but this time dealing in scientists doing certain kinds of biotech research.

And then how she had had to run away on election night, and how on that night he had helped her to evade her husband and his companions, who were now clearly correlated with the attempted election theft.

Edgardo bobbed along next to him as he told the tale, nodding at each new bit of information, lips pursed tightly, head tilted to the side. It was like confessing to a giant praying mantis.

“So,” he said at last. “Now you’re out of touch with her?”

“That’s right. She said she’d call me, but she hasn’t.”

“But she will have to be very careful, now that her husband knows that you exist.”

“Yes. But—will he be able to identify who I am, do you think?”

“I think that’s very possible, if he has access to her work files. Do you know if he does?”

“She worked for him.”

“So. And he knows that someone was helping her that night.”

“More than one person, actually, because of the guys in the park.”

“Yes. That might help you, by muddying the waters. But still, say he goes through her records to find out who she has been in contact with—will he find you?”

“I was one of the people she had under surveillance.”

“But there will be a lot of those. Anything more?”

Frank tried to remember. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “I thought we were being careful, but…”

“Did she call you on your phone?”

“Yes, a few times. But only from pay phones.”

“But she might have been chipped at the time.”

“She tried to be careful about that.”

“Yes, but it didn’t always work, isn’t that what you said?”

“Right. But”—remembering back—“I don’t think she ever said my name.”

“Well—if you were ever both chipped at the same time, maybe he would be able to see when you got together. And if he sourced all your cell-phone calls, some would come from pay phones, and he might be able to cross-GPS those with her.”

“Are pay phones GPSed?”

Edgardo glanced at him. “They stay in one spot, which you can then GPS.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Edgardo cackled and waved an elbow at Frank as they ran. “There’s lots of ways to find people! There’s your acquaintances in the park, for instance. If he went out there and asked around, with a photo of you, he might be able to confirm.”

“I’m just Professor Nosebleed to them.”

“Yes, but the correlations…So,” Edgardo said after a silence had stretched out a quarter mile or more. “It seems like you probably ought to take some kind of preemptive action.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well. You followed him to their apartment, right?”

“Yes.”

“Not your wisest move of that night, by the way.”

Frank didn’t want to explain that his capacity for decision making had been possibly injured, and perhaps not good to begin with.

“—but now we can probably use that information to find out his cover identity, for a start.”

“I don’t know the address.”

“Well, you need to get it. Also the names on the doorbell plate, if there are any. But the apartment number for sure.”

“Okay, I’ll go back.”

“Good. Be discreet. With that information, my friends could help you take it further. Given what’s happened, they might give it a pretty high priority, to find out who he really works for.”

“And who do your friends work for?”

“Well. They’re scattered around. It’s a kind of internal check group.”

“And you trust them on this kind of stuff?”

“Oh yes.” There was a reptilian look in Edgardo’s eye that gave Frank a shiver.

-

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Frank passed his hours feeling baffled, and, under everything else, afraid. Or maybe, he thought, the feeling would be better characterized as extreme anxiety. He would wake in the mornings, take stock, remember where he was: in the Khembali embassy house’s garden shed, with Rudra snoring up on the bed and Frank on his foam mattress on the floor.

The daylight slanting through their one window would usually have roused him. He would listen to Rudra’s distressed breathing, sit up and tap on his laptop, look at the headlines and the weather forecast, and Emersonforthe day.com:

Maybe Emerson too had been hit on the head. Frank wanted to look into that. And he needed to look into Thoreau, too. Recently the keepers of the site had been posting lots of Henry David Thoreau, Emerson’s young friend and occasional handyman. Amazing that two such minds had lived at the same time, in the same town—even for a while the same house. Thoreau, Frank was finding in these morning reads, was the great philosopher of the forest at the edge of town, and as such extremely useful to Frank—often more so, dare he say it, than the old man himself.

Today’s Thoreau was from his journal:

Except Thoreau had been a consumptive, active though he was in his daily life as a surveyor and wandering botanist. This passage had been written only two years before he died of tuberculosis, so he must have known by then that his lungs were compromised, and his trust in having a good body misplaced. For lack of a simple antibiotic, Thoreau had lost thirty years. Still he had lived the day, and paid ferocious attention to it, as a very respectable early scientist.

And so up and off! And up Frank would leap, thinking about what the New England pair had said, and would dress and slip out the door in a frame of mind to see the world and act in it. No matter how early he went out, he always found some of the old Khembalis already out in the vegetable garden they had planted in the backyard, mumbling to themselves as they weeded. Frank might stop to say hi to Qang if she were out there, or dip his head in the door to tell her whether he thought he would be home for dinner that night; that was hardly ever, but she liked it when he let her know.

Then off to Optimodal on foot, blinking dreamily in the morning light, Wilson Avenue all rumbly and stinky with cars on the way to work. The walk was a little long, as all walks in D.C. tended to be; it was a city built for cars, like every other city. But the walk forced him to wake up, and to look closely at the great number of trees he passed. Even here on Wilson, it was impossible to forget they lived in a forest.

Then into the gym for a quick workout to get his brain fully awake—or as fully awake as it got these days. There was something wrong there. A fog in certain areas. He found it was easiest to do the same thing every day, reducing the number of decisions he had to make. Habitual action was a ritual that could be regarded as a kind of worship of the day. And it was so much easier.

Sometimes Diane was there, a creature of habit also, and uneasily he would say hi, and uneasily she would say hi back. They were still supposed to be rescheduling a dinner to celebrate the salting of the North Atlantic, but she had said she would get back to him about a good time for it, and he was therefore waiting for her to bring it up, and she wasn’t. This was adding daily to his anxiety. Who knew what anything meant, really.

Then at work, Diane ran them through their paces as they produced the action plan that she thought was their responsibility to the new president. They were to lay out the current moment of the abrupt climate change they were experiencing, and discuss in full whether there was any way back out of it—and if there was, what kind of policies and activities might achieve it.

One thing that she had no patience for was the idea that having restarted the Gulf Stream, they were now out of the woods. She shook her head darkly when she saw this implied in communications from other agencies, or in the media. It did not help that they were suddenly experiencing a warm spell unlike anything that had happened the previous year, when the long winter had clamped down in October and never let up until May. This year, after several hard freezes, they were experiencing a balmy and almost rain-free Indian summer. Everyone wanted to explain it by the restoration of the Gulf Stream, and there may even have been some truth to that, but there was no way to be sure. Natural variation had too great an amplitude to allow for any such one-to-one correspondence of climatic cause and effect, although unfortunately this was something the climate skeptics and carbon supporters were also always saying, so that it was tricky for Diane to try to make the distinction.

But she was persistent, even adamant. “We have to put the Gulf Stream action to one side, and take a look at all the rest of it,” she commanded. “Chase is going to need that from us to go forward.”

Back in his office, therefore, Frank would sit at his desk, staring at his list of Things To Do. But all in a vain attempt to take his mind off Caroline.

Ordinarily the list would be enough to distract anyone. Its length and difficulty made it all by itself a kind of blow to the head. It induced an awe so great that it resembled apathy. They had done so much and yet there was so much left to do. And as more disasters blasted into the world, their Things To Do list would lengthen. It would never shorten. They were like the Dutch boy sticking his finger into the failing dike. What had happened to Khembalung was going to happen everywhere.

But there would still be land above water. There would still be things to be done. One had to try.

Caroline had spoken of her Plan B as if she had confidence in it. She must have had a place to go, a bank account, that sort of thing.

Frank checked out the figures from the oceanography group. The oceans covered about seventy percent of the globe. About two hundred million square kilometers, therefore, and in the wake of the first really big chunks of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet floating away, sea level was reported to have risen about twenty centimeters. The oceanographers had been measuring sea level rise a millimeter at a time, mostly from water warming up and expanding, so they were blown away and spoke of this twenty centimeters’ rise as of a Noah’s flood. Kenzo was simply bursting with amazement and pride.

Back-of-the-envelope calculation: .2 meters times the two hundred million square kilometers, was that forty thousand cubic kilometers? A lot of water. Measurements from the last few years had Antarctica losing a hundred and fifty cubic kilometers a year, with thirty to fifty more coming off Greenland. So, now about two hundred years’ worth had come off in one year. No wonder they were freaking out. The difference no doubt lay in the fact that the melt before had been actual melting, whereas now what was happening was a matter of icebergs breaking off their perch and sliding down into the ocean. Obviously it made a big difference in how fast it could happen.

Frank brought the figures in with him to the meeting of Diane’s strategic group scheduled for that afternoon, and listened to the others make their presentations. They were interesting talks, if daunting. They took his mind off Caroline, one had to say that. At least most of the time.

At the end of the talks, Diane described her sense of the situation. For her, there was a lot that was good news. First, Phil Chase was certain to be more supportive of NSF, and of science in general, than his predecessor had been. Second, the salting of the North Atlantic appeared to be having the effect they had hoped for: the Gulf Stream was now running at nearly its previous strength up into the Norwegian and Greenland Seas, following its earlier path in a manner that seemed to indicate the renewed pattern was, for now, fairly robust. They were still collecting data on the deeper part of the thermohaline circulation, which ran southward underneath the northerly flow of the Gulf Stream. If the southward undercurrent was running strong, they might be okay there.

“There’s so much surface pressure northward,” Kenzo said. “Maybe all we’ll have to do from now on is to monitor the salinity and the currents. We might be able to intervene early enough in any stall process that we wouldn’t need as much salt as we applied last fall. Maybe a certain percentage of the retiring oil fleet could be mothballed, in case we needed a salt fleet to go up there again and make another application.”

“It would take a change in thinking,” Diane said. “Up until now, people have only wanted to pay for disasters after they’ve happened, to make sure the pay-out was really necessary.”

Kenzo said, “But now the true costs of that strategy are becoming clear.”

“When it’s too late,” Edgardo added, his usual refrain.

Diane wrinkled her nose at Edgardo, as she often did, and made her usual rejoinder; they had no choice but to proceed from where they were now. “So, let’s follow up on that one. It would have to be a kind of insurance model, or a hedge fund. Maybe the reinsurance industry will be trying to impose something like that on the rest of the economy anyway. We’ll talk to them.”

She moved on to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet situation. One of Kenzo’s oceanographer colleagues gave them a presentation on the latest, showing with maps and satellite photos the tabular superbergs that had detached and slipped off their underwater perch and floated away.

Diane said, “I’d like some really good 3-D graphics on this, to show the new president and Congress, and the public too.”

“All very well,” Edgardo said, “but what can we do about it, aside from telling people it’s coming?”

Not much; or nothing. Even if they somehow managed to lower the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and therefore the air temperatures, the already-rising ocean temperatures would be slow to follow. There was a continuity effect.

So they couldn’t stop the WAIS from detaching.

They couldn’t lower the rising sea level that resulted.

And they couldn’t de-acidify the ocean.

This last was a particularly troubling problem. The CO₂ they had introduced into the atmosphere had been partially taken up by the ocean; the absorption rate now was about three billion tons of carbon a year into the ocean, and one estimate of the total uptake since the industrial revolution was four hundred billion tons. As a result, the ocean had become measurably more acidic, going from 8.2 to 8.1 on the pH scale, which was a logarithmic scale, so that the 0.1 shift meant thirty percent more hydrogen ions in the water. It was felt that certain species of phytoplankton would have their very thin calcium shells in effect eaten away. They would die, a number of species would go extinct, and these very species constituted a big fraction of the bottom of the ocean’s food chain.

But de-acidifying the ocean was not an option. There were fairly arcane chemistry reasons why it was easier for sea water to become more acidic than to become more basic. A Royal Society paper had calculated, for the sake of estimating the scale of the problem, that if they mined and crushed exposed limestone and marble in the British Isles, “features such as the White Cliffs of Dover would be rapidly consumed,” because it would take sixty square kilometers of limestone mined a hundred meters deep, every year, just to hold the status quo. All at a huge carbon cost for the excavations, of course, exacerbating the very problem they were trying to solve. But this was just a thought experiment anyway. It wouldn’t work; it was an unmitigatable problem.

And that afternoon, as they went down Diane’s list together, they saw that almost all of the climate and environmental changes they were seeing, or could see coming, were not susceptible to mitigation. Their big success of the fall, the restarting of the thermohaline cycle, had been an anomaly in that sense. The Gulf Stream had rested so closely to a tipping point in its action that humans had, by an application at the largest industrial scale they commanded, managed to tip that balance—at least temporarily. And as a result (maybe) the last month on the East Coast had been markedly warmer than the previous December had been. Perhaps they had even escaped the Youngest Dryas. So now, in one of those quick leaps that humans were prone to make (although science was not), people were talking about the climate problem as if it were something that they could terraform their way out of, or even had solved already!

It wasn’t true. Most of their remaining problems were so big that they had too much heft and momentum for people to find any way to slow them, much less reverse them.

So, at the end of this meeting, Edgardo shook his head. “Well, this is grim! There is not much we can do! We would need much more energy than we command right now. And it would have to be clean energy at that.”

Diane agreed. “Clean power is our only way out. That means solar power, I’d say. Maybe wind, although it would take an awful lot of pylons. Maybe nuclear, just one last generation to tide us over. Maybe ocean power too, if we could properly tap into currents or tides or waves. To me—when I look at factors like technical developmental readiness, and manufacturing capability, and current costs, and dangers and damage—I’d say our best chance lies in a really hard push on solar. A kind of Manhattan Project devoted to solar power.”

She raised a finger: “And when I say Manhattan Project, I don’t mean the kind of silver bullet that people seem to mean when they say Manhattan Project. I mean the part of the Manhattan Project that not only designed the bomb but also entrained something like twenty percent of America’s industrial capacity to make the fissionable material. About the same percent of capacity as the auto industry, and right when they needed every bit of capacity for the other parts of the war. That’s the kind of commitment we need now. Because if we had good solar power—”

She made one of her characteristic gestures, one that Frank had become very fond of: an opening of the palm, turned up and held out to the world. “We might be able to stabilize the climate. Let’s push all the aspects of this. Let’s organize the case, and take it to Phil Chase, and get him prepped for when he takes office.”

After the meeting, Frank couldn’t focus. He checked his e-mail, his cell phone, his FOG phone, his office phone: no messages. Caroline had not called for yet another day. No telling where she was or what was happening.

That night he wandered north up Connecticut Avenue, past the hotel where Reagan had been shot, past the Chinese embassy with its Tibetan and Falun Gong protesters in front singing, until he crossed the big bridge over Rock Creek, guarded by its four Disneyesque lion statues. Out on the middle of the bridge there was a tiny relief from the claustrophobia of the city and forest. It was one of the only places where Rock Creek seemed like a big gorge.

He continued to the clutch of little restaurants on the far side of the bridge and chose one of the Indian ones. Ate a meal thinking about the names on the wine list. Vineyards in Bangalore, why was this surprising? He read his laptop over milk tea.

When it was late enough, he struck off to the northwest, toward Bethesda. Back streets, residential, the forest taking over. Night in the city, sound of distant sirens. For the first time in the day he felt awake. It was a long hike.

Up on Wisconsin he came into the realm of the Persian rug shops, and slowed down. It was still too early. Into a bar, afraid to drink, afraid to think. A whiskey for courage. Out again into the bright night of Wisconsin, then west into the strange tangle of streets backing it. The Metro stop had been like a fountain of money and people and buildings pouring up out of the earth, overwhelming what had been here before. Some of the old houses that still remained undemolished suggested a little urban space of the 1930s, almost like the back streets of Georgetown.

This was the Quiblers’ neighborhood, but he didn’t want to intrude, nor was he in the mood to be sociable. Too late for that, but not early enough for his task. Pass by and on up Woodson, off to the left, now he was in the well-remembered neighborhood of Caroline and her ex-husband. Finally it was late enough, and yet not too late: midnight. His pulse was beginning to pound a little in his neck, and he wished he hadn’t had that whiskey. The streets were not entirely empty; in this city that wouldn’t happen until more like two. But that was okay. Up the steps of the apartment building that Caroline’s ex had gone into. The drape had been pulled back at the top window of the building. He shone his penlight on the address list under its glass, took a photo of it with his cell phone. Quite a few of the little slots had been left blank. He photoed the street address above the door as well, then turned and walked down the street, away from the streetlight he had stood under on that most fateful election night. His own fate, Caroline’s, the nation’s, the world’s—but who knew? Probably it only felt that way. His heart was beating so hard. Fight or flight, sure; but what happened if one could neither fight nor flee?

He turned a corner and ran.

Back in his office. Late in the day. He had given Edgardo his information from Bethesda a few days before. Soon he would have to decide again what to do after work.

Unable to face that, he continued to work. If only he could work all the time he would never have to decide anything.

He typed up his notes from Diane’s last two meetings. So, he thought as he looked them over, it had come to this: they had fucked up the world so badly that only the rapid invention and deployment of some kind of clean power generation much more powerful than what they had now would be enough to extricate them from the mess. If it could be done at all.

That meant solar, as Diane had concluded. Wind was too diffuse, waves and currents too hard to extract energy from. Fusion was like a mirage on a desert road, always the same distance away. Ordinary nuclear—well, that was a possibility, as Diane had pointed out. A very real possibility. It was dangerous and created waste for the ages, but it might be done. Some kinds of cost-benefit analysis might favor it.

But it was hard to imagine making it really safe. To do so they would have to become like the French (gasp!), who got ninety percent of their power from nuclear plants, all built to the same stringent standards. Not the likeliest scenario for the rest of the world, but not physically impossible. The U.S. Navy had run a safe nuclear program ever since the 1950s. Frank wrote on his notepad: Is French nuclear power safe? Is US Navy nuclear safe? What does safe mean? Can you recycle spent fuel and guard the bomb-level plutonium that would finally reduce out of it? All that would have to be investigated and discussed. Nothing could be taken off the table just because it might create poisons that would last fifty thousand years.

On the other hand, solar was coming along fast enough to encourage Frank to hope for even more acceleration. There were problems, but ultimately the fundamental point remained: in every moment an incredible amount of energy rained down from the sun onto the Earth. That was what oil was, after all: a small portion of the sun’s energy, captured by photosynthesis over millions of years—all those plants, fixing carbon and then dying, then getting condensed into a sludge and buried rather than returning to the air. Millions of years of sunlight caught that way. Every tank of gas burned about a hundred acres of what had been a forest’s carbon. Or say a hundred years of a single acre’s production of forest carbon. This was a very impressive condensate! It made sense that matching it with the real-time energy input from any other system would be difficult.

But sunlight itself rained down perpetually. About seventy percent of the photosynthesis that took place on Earth was already entrained to human uses, but photosysnthesis only caught a small fraction of the total amount of solar energy striking the planet each day. Those totals, day after day, soon dwarfed even what had been caught in the Triassic fossil carbon. Every couple of months, the whole Triassic’s capture was surpassed. So the potential was there.

This was true in so many areas. The potential was there, but time was required to realize the potential, and now it was beginning to seem like they did not have much time. Speed was crucial. This was the reason Diane and others were still contemplating nuclear.

It would be good if they needed less energy. Well, but this was an entirely different problem, dragging in many other issues—technology, consumption, lifestyles, values, habits—also the sheer number of humans on the planet. Perhaps seven billion was too many, perhaps six billion was too many. It was possible that three billion was too many. Their six billion could be a kind of oil bubble.

Edgardo was not calling, neither was Caroline calling.

Desperate for ways to occupy his mind—though of course he did not think of it that way, in order not to break the spell—Frank began to look into estimates of the Earth’s maximum human carrying capacity. This turned out (usefully enough for his real purpose) to be an incredibly vexed topic, argued over for centuries already, with no clear answers yet found. The literature contained estimates for the Earth’s human carrying capacity ranging from one hundred million to twelve trillion. Quite a spread! Although here the outliers were clearly the result of some heavily ideological analyses; the high estimate appeared to be translating the sunlight hitting the Earth directly into human calories, with no other factors included; the low estimate appeared not to like human beings, even to regard them as some kind of parasite.

The majority of serious opinion came in between two billion and thirty billion; this was satisfyingly tighter than the seven magnitudes separating the outlier estimates, but for practical purposes still a big variance, especially considering how important the real number was. If the carrying capacity of the planet was two billion, they had badly overshot and were in serious trouble, looking at a major dieback that might spiral to near extinction. If on the other hand the thirty billion figure was correct, they had some wiggle-room to maneuver.

But there were hardly any scientific or governmental organizations even looking at this issue. Zero Population Growth was one of the smallest advocacy groups in Washington, which was saying a lot; and Negative Population Growth (a bad name, it seemed to Frank) turned out to be a mom-and-pop operation run out of a garage. It was bizarre.

He read one paper, written as if by a Martian, that suggested if humanity cared to share the planet with the other species, especially the mammals—and could they really survive without them?—then they should restrict their population to something like two billion, occupying only a networked fraction of the landscape. Leaving the rest of the animals in possession of a larger networked fraction. It was a pretty persuasive paper.

As another occupier of his thoughts (though now hunger was going to drive him out into the world), he looked into theories of long-term strategic policy, thinking this might give him some tools for thinking through these things. It was another area that seemed on the face of it to be important, yet was under-studied as far as Frank could tell. Most theorists in the field, he found, had agreed that the goal or method of long-term strategic thinking ought to be “robustness,” which meant that you had to find things to do that would almost certainly do some good, no matter which particular future came to pass. Nice work if you could get it! Although some of the theorists actually had developed rubrics to evaluate the robustness of proposed policies. That could be useful. But when it came to generating the policies, things got more vague.

Just do the obvious things, Vanderwal. Do the necessary.

Diane was already acting in the manner suggested by most long-term strategy theory, because in any scenario conceivable, copious amounts of clean solar energy would almost certainly be a good thing. It was, therefore, a robust plan.

So, solar power:

1) there were the photovoltaics, in which sunlight was transformed into alternating current by way of photons stimulating piezoelectricity in silicon.

2) there were the Stirling engines, external heat engines that used mirror dishes controlled by computers to reflect sunlight onto a hydrogen-filled closed element that heated to 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, driving pistons which generated the electricity. The engine had been designed by a Scot named Stirling in 1816.

All solar technologies had efficiency rates measured as a percentage of the sunlight’s photonic energy transferred successfully to alternating current electricity. They had been getting some really good numbers from solar panels, up to twenty percent, but this Stirling engine got thirty. Given the amount of photons raining down, that was really good. That would add up fast.

Then he found a link to a site that explained that Southern California Edison had built a Stirling system to power a five-hundred-megawatt plant; most traditionally-powered plants were five hundred or a thousand megawatts, so this was full size. That meant there was some practical experience with real-world, commercial versions of this technology. Also some manufacturing ability, ready to be deployed. All good news when contemplating the need for speed.

Banishing the thought (recurrent about every hour) that they should have been doing this a long time ago, Frank called SCE and asked a long string of questions of the CPM (the Cognizant Program Manager, a useful acronym that only NSF appeared to use). This turned out to be a man who was more than happy to talk—who would have talked all day, maybe all night. With difficulty Frank got him to stop. Lots of enthusiasm for the Stirling system there.

Well, more grist for the mill. Over the past year Frank had been giving alternative energy about a quarter of his working time, and now he saw he was going to have to bump that up. Everything from now on would be jacked to emergency levels. Not a comfortable feeling, but there was no avoiding it. It was like an existential condition, as if he had become Alice’s White Rabbit: I’m late! I’m late! I’m late! And most of the time he managed to obscure from his conscious train of thought the true source of his anxiety.

One day, later that week, when he was deep in work’s oblivion, Diane appeared in his doorway, startling him. He was pleased, then nervous; they had not yet found a new balance. After Caroline had called Frank with her emergency situation, Frank had hastily called Diane to cancel before thinking of any plausible non-other-woman-related reason for doing so, and so had given no explanation at all—which opacity was suspicious, and probably more impolite than the cancellation per se. Opacity was seldom conducive to rapport.

“Hi, Diane,” he said now, aping normality. “What’s happening?”

She looked at him with a curious expression. “I just got a call from Phil Chase.”

“Wow, what did he want?”

“He asked me if I would be his science advisor.”

Frank found he was standing. He reached out and shook Diane’s hand, then hugged her. “Now that is news we have to celebrate,” he declared, seizing the bull by the horns. “I’m sorry about that the other night, I still owe you dinner! Can I take you out tonight?”

“Sure,” she said easily, as if there had been no problem. She was so cool; maybe there never had been a problem. Frank couldn’t be sure. “Meet you at,” she checked her watch, “at six, okay? Now I’m going to go call my kids.”

But then she stopped on her way out, and again looked at him oddly. “You must have had something to do with this,” she said suddenly.

“Me? I don’t think so. What do you mean?”

“Talking to Charlie Quibler, maybe?”

“Oh, no. I mean, of course I’ve talked to Charlie about some of our stuff, generally—”

“And he’s been Chase’s environment guy.”

“Well yes, but you know, Charlie’s just part of a large staff, and he’s been staying at home with Joe, so he hasn’t been a major factor with Chase for some time, as I understand it. Mostly just a voice on the phone. He says he doesn’t get listened to. He says he’s kind of like Jiminy Cricket was to Pinocchio, when Pinocchio’s nose was at its longest.”

Diane laughed. “Yeah sure. Let’s meet over at Optimodal, shall we? Let’s say seven instead of six. I want to run some of this off.”

Now that was something he could understand. “Sure. See you there.”

Frank sat in his chair feeling his chest puffed out: another cliché revealed to be an accurate account of emotion’s effects on the body. Everyone was the same. It occurred to him that maybe Charlie had had something to do with it, after all. Someone had to have advised Chase whom to choose for this post, and as far as Frank knew, Chase and Diane had never met. So—that was interesting.

Frank went over to the Optimodal Health Club just after six, waved to Diane on the elliptical in the next room, and stomped up the Stairmaster for the equivalent of about a thousand vertical feet. After that he showered and dressed, getting into one of his “nicer” shirts for the occasion, and met Diane out in the lobby at the appointed time. She too had changed into something nice, and for a second Frank considered the possibility that she lived out of her office and Optimodal, just as he had contemplated doing before building his treehouse. What evidence did he or anyone else have to disprove it? When they arrived in the morning she was there, when they left at night she was there. There were couches in her big office, and she went to Optimodal every morning of the week, as far as he knew….

But then again, she certainly had a home somewhere. Everyone did, except for him. And the bros in the park. And the fregans and ferals proliferating in the metropolis. Indeed some twenty or thirty million people in America, he had read. But one thought of everyone as having a home.

Enough—it was time to refocus on the moment and their date. It had to be called that. Their second date, in fact—the first one having occurred by accident in New York, after discussing the North Atlantic project at the UN. And now they were in a Lebanese restaurant in Georgetown that Diane had recently discovered.

And it was very nice. Now they could celebrate not only the actual salting itself, but its subsequent success in restarting the thermohaline circulation; and now, also, Diane’s invitation to become the new Presidential Science Advisor.

She was pleased with this last, Frank could see. “Tell me about it,” he said to her when they were settled into the main course. “Is it a good position? I mean, what does the science advisor do?” Did it have any power, in other words?

“It all depends on the president,” Diane said. “I’ve been looking into it, and it appears the position began as Nixon’s way of spanking the science community for publicly backing Johnson over Goldwater. He sent NSF packing out here to Arlington, and abolished his science advisory committee, and established this position. So it became a single advisor he could appoint without any consultation or approval mechanism, and then he could stick them on the shelf somewhere. Which is where these people have usually stayed, except in a few instances.”

That didn’t sound good. “But?”

“Well, in theory, if a president were listening, it could get pretty interesting. I mean, clearly there’s a need for more coordination of the sciences in the federal government. We’ve seen that at NSF. Ideally there would be a cabinet post, you know, some kind of Department of Science, with a Secretary of Science.”

“The science czar.”

“Yes.” She was wrinkling her nose. “Except that would create huge amounts of trouble, because really, most of the federal agencies are already supposed to be run scientifically, or have science as part of their subject, or in their operation. So if someone tried to start a Department of Science, it would poach on any number of other agencies, and none of them would stand for it. They would gang up on such an advisor and kill him, like they did to the so-called intelligence czar when they tried to coordinate the intelligence agencies.”

This gave Frank a chill. “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

“So, now, maybe the science advisor could act like a kind of personal advisor. You know. If we presented a menu of really robust options, and Chase chose some of them to enact, then…well. It would be the president himself advocating for science.”

“And he might want to do that, given the situation.”

“Yes, it seems that way, doesn’t it? Although Washington has a way of bogging people down.”

“The swamp.”

“Yes, the swamp. But if the swamp freezes over”—they laughed—“then maybe we can ice-skate over the obstacles!”

Frank nodded. “Speaking of which, we were supposed to be going to try ice-skating down here, when the river froze over.”

“That’s right, we were. But now we’ve got this so-called heat spell.”

“True. Return of the Gulf Stream.”

“That is so crazy. I bet we will get freezing spells just like before.”

“Yes. Well, until that happens maybe we can just walk the shore then, and see where you could rent ice skates when the time comes.”

“Sure. I think the Georgetown Rowing Club is going to do it, we can go check it out. I read they’re going to convert when the river freezes over. They’re going to put out floodlights and boundary lines and everything.”

“Good for them! Let’s go take a look after dinner.”

And so they finished the meal cheerfully, moving from one great Levantine dish to the next. Even the basics were exquisite: olives, hummus, dill—everything. And by the time they were done they had split a bottle of a dry white wine. They walked down to the Potomac arm in arm, as they had in Manhattan so very briefly; they walked the Georgetown waterfront, where the potted shrubs lining the river wall were lit by little white Christmas tree lights. All this had been overwhelmed in the great flood, and they could still see the high-water mark on the buildings behind the walk, but other than that, things were much as they had been before, the river as calm as a sheet of black silk as it poured under the Key Bridge.

Then they came to the mouth of Rock Creek, a tiny little thing. Following it upstream in his mind, Frank came to the park and his treehouse, standing right over a bend in this same creek—and thus it occurred to him to think, Here you are fooling around with another woman while your Caroline is in trouble God knows where. What would she think if she saw you?

Which was a hard thought to recover from; and Diane saw that his mood had changed. Quickly he suggested they warm up over drinks.

They retired to a bar overlooking the confluence of the creek and the river, on the Georgetown side. They ordered Irish coffees. Frank warmed up again, his sudden stab of dread dispelled by Diane’s immense calmness, by the aura of reality that emanated from her. It was reassuring to be around her; precisely the opposite of the feeling he had when—

But he stayed in the moment. He agreed with Diane’s comment that Irish coffee provided the perfect compound of stimulant and relaxant, sugar and fat, hydration and warmth. “It must have been invented by scientists,” she said. “It’s like it’s made to a formula to hit all the receptors at once.”

Frank said, “I remember it’s what they always used to serve at the Salk Institute after their seminars. They’ve got a patio deck overlooking the Pacific, and everyone would go out with Irish coffees and watch the sunset.”

“Nice.”

Later, as Frank walked her back up through Georgetown to her car, she said, “I was wondering if you’d be interested in joining my advisory staff. It would be an extension of the work you’ve been doing at NSF. I mean, I know you’re planning to go back to San Diego, but until then, you know…I could use your help.”

Frank had stopped walking. Diane turned and glanced up at him, shyly it seemed, and then looked away, down M Street. The stretch they could see looked to Frank like the Platonic form of a Midwestern main street, totally unlike the rest of D.C.

“Sure,” Frank heard himself say. He realized that in some sense he had to accept her offer. He had no choice; he was only in D.C. now because of her previous invitation to work on the climate problem, and he had been doing that for a year now. And they were friends, they were colleagues; they were…“I mean, I’ll have to check with my department and all first, to make sure it will all be okay at UCSD. But I think it could be really interesting.”

“Oh good. Good. I was hoping you’d say yes.”

The next morning, at work his doorway darkened, and he swung his chair around, expecting to see Diane, there to discuss their move to the Presidential Science Advisor’s offices—

“Oh! Edgardo!”

“Hi, Frank. Hey, are you up for getting a bite at the Food Factory?” Waggling his eyebrows Groucho-istically.

“Sure,” Frank said, trying to sound natural. It was hard not to look around his office as he saved and shut the file he was working on.

On the way to the Food Factory, Edgardo surreptitiously ran a wand over Frank, and gave it to Frank, who did the same for him. Then they went in and stood at a bar, noisily eating chips and salsa.

“What is it?”

“A friend of mine has tracked down your friend and her husband.”

“Ah ha! And?”

“They work for a unit of a black agency called Advanced Research and Development Agency Prime. The man’s name is Edward Cooper, and hers is Caroline Churchland. They ran a big data-mining effort, which was a combination of the Total Information Awareness project and some other black programs in Homeland Security.”

“Wait—she didn’t work for him?”

“No. My friend says it was more like the other way around. She headed the program, but he was brought in to help when some surveillance issues cropped up. He came from Homeland Security, and before that CIA, where he was on the Afghanistan detail. My friend says the program got a lot more serious when he arrived.”

“Serious?”

“Some surveillance issues. My friend didn’t know what that meant. And then this attempt on the election that she tipped us to.”

“But he worked for her?”

“Yes.”

“And when did they get married?”

“About two years before he joined her project.”

“And he worked for her.”

“That’s what I was told. Also, my friend thinks he probably knows where she’s gone.”

“What!”

“That’s what he told me. On the night she disappeared, you see, there was a call from a pay phone she had used before, a call to the Khembali embassy. I take it that was to you?”

“She left a message,” Frank muttered, more and more worried. “But so?”

“Well, there was another call from that pay phone, to a number in Maine. My friend found the address for that number, and it’s the number of your friend’s college roommate. And that roommate has a vacation home on an island up there. And the power has just been turned on for that vacation home. So he thinks that’s where she may have gone, and, as I’m sure you can see, he furthermore thinks that if he can track her that well, at his remove, then her husband is likely to be even faster at it.”

“Shit.” Frank’s feet were cold.

“Shit indeed. Possibly you should warn her. I mean, if she thinks she’s hidden herself—”

“Yeah, sure,” Frank said, thinking furiously. “But another thing—if her ex could find her, couldn’t he find me too?”

“Maybe so.”

They regarded each other.

“We have to neutralize this guy somehow,” Frank said.

Edgardo shook his head. “Do not say that, my friend.”

“Why not?”

“Neutralize?” He dragged out the word, his expression suddenly black. “Eliminate? Remove? Equalize? Disable? DX? Disappear? Liquidate?”

“I don’t mean any of those,” Frank explained. “I just meant neutralize. As in, unable to affect us. Made neutral to us.”

“Hard to do,” Edgardo said. “I mean, get a restraining order? You don’t want to go there. It doesn’t work even if you can get them.”

“Well?”

“You may just have to live with it.”

“Live with it? With what?”

Edgardo shrugged. “Hard to say right now.”

“I can’t live with it if he’s trying to harm her, and there’s a good chance of him finding her.”

“I know.”

“I’ll have to go find her first.”

Edgardo nodded, looking at him with an evaluative expression. “Maybe so.”

-

AT THE QUIBLERS’ HOUSE IN BETHESDA this unsettled winter, things were busier than ever. This was mainly because of Phil Chase’s election, which of course had galvanized his Senatorial office, turning his staff into one part of a much larger transition team.

A presidential transition was a major thing, and there were famous cases of failed transitions by earlier administrations that were enough to put a spur to their rears, reminding them of the dire consequences that ineptitude in this area could have on the subsequent fates of the presidents involved. It was important to make a good running start, to craft the kind of “first hundred days” that had energized the incoming administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, setting the model for most presidents since to try to emulate. Critical appointments had to be made, bold new programs turned into law.

Phil was well aware of this challenge and its history, and was determined to meet it successfully. “We’ll call it the First Sixty Days,” he said to his staff. “Because there’s no time to lose!” He had not slowed down after the election; indeed it seemed to Charlie Quibler that he had even stepped up the pace, if that was possible. Ignoring the claim of irregularities in the Oregon vote—claims which had become standard in any case ever since the tainted elections at the beginning of the century—and secure in the knowledge that the American public did not like to think about troubling news of this sort no matter who won, Phil was free to forge ahead with a nonstop schedule of meetings, meetings from dawn till midnight, and often long past it. He was lucky he was one of those people who only needed a few hours of sleep a day to get by.

Not so Charlie, who was jolted out of sleep far too often by calls from his colleague Roy Anastophoulus, Phil’s new chief of staff, asking him to come down to the office and pitch in.

“Roy, I can’t,” Charlie would say. “I’ve got Joe here, Anna’s off to work already, and we’ve got Gymboree.”

“Gymboree? Am I hearing this? Charlie which is more important to the fate of the Republic, advising the president or going to Gymboree?”

“False choice,” Charlie would snap. “Although Gymboree is far more important if we want Joe to sleep well at night, which we do. You’re talking to me now, right? That’s what telephones are for. How would this change in any way if I were down there?”

“Yeah yeah yeah yeah, hey Chucker I gotta go now, but listen you have to come in from the cold, this is no time to be baby-sitting, we’ve got the fate of the world in the balance and we need you in the office and taking one of these crucial jobs that no one else can fill as well as you can. Joe is around two right? So you can put him in the daycare down here at the White House, or anywhere else in the greater metropolitan region for that matter, but you have to be here or else you will have missed the train, Phil isn’t going to stand for someone phoning home like E.T., lost somewhere in Bethesda when the world is sinking and freezing and drowning and burning up and everything else all at once.”

“Roy. Stop. I am talking to you like once an hour, maybe more. I couldn’t talk to you more if we were handcuffed together.”

“Yeah it’s nice it’s sweet it’s one of the treasured parts of my day, but it’s a face business, you know that, and I haven’t seen you in months, and Phil hasn’t either, and I’m afraid it’s getting to be a case of not seen not heard.”

“Are you establishing a climate-change task force?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to ask Diane Chang to be the science advisor?”

“Yes. He already did.”

“And are you going to convene a meeting with all the reinsurance companies?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re proposing the legislative package to the Congress?”

This was Charlie’s big omnibus environmental bill, brought back—in theory—from death by dismemberment.

“Of course we are.”

“So how exactly am I being cut out? That’s every single thing I’ve ever suggested to you.”

“But Charlie, I’m looking forward, to how you will be cut out. You’ve gotta put Joe in daycare and come in out of the cold.”

“But I don’t want to.”

“I gotta go you get a grip and get down here bye.”

He sounded truly annoyed. But Charlie could speak his mind with Roy, and he wasn’t going to let the election change that. And when he woke up in the morning, and considered that he could either go down to the Mall and talk policy with policy wonks all day, and get home late every night—or he could spend that day with Joe wandering the parks and bookstores of Bethesda, calling in to Phil’s office from time to time to have those same policy talks in mercifully truncated form, he knew very well which day he preferred. It was an easy call, a no-brainer. He liked spending time with Joe. With all its problems and crises, he enjoyed it more than almost anything he had ever done. And Joe was growing up fast, and Charlie could see that what he enjoyed most in their life together was only going to last until preschool, if then. It went by fast!

Indeed, in the last week or so it seemed that Joe was changing so fast that Charlie’s desire to spend time with him was becoming as much a result of worry as of desire for pleasure. It seemed he was dealing with a different kid. But Charlie suppressed this feeling, and tried to pretend to himself that it was only for positive reasons that he wanted to stay home.

Only occasionally, and for short periods, could he think honestly about this to himself. Nothing about the matter was obvious, even when he did try to think about it. Because ever since their trip to Khembalung, Joe had been a little different—feverish, Anna claimed, although only her closest ovulation-monitoring thermometer could find this fever—but in any case hectic, and irritable in a way that was unlike his earlier irritability, which had seemed to Charlie a kind of cosmic energy, a force chafing at its restraints. After Khembalung it had turned peevish, even pained.

All this had coincided with what Charlie regarded as undue interest in Joe on the part of the Khembalis, and Charlie had gotten Drepung to admit that the Khembalis thought that Joe was one of their great lamas, reincarnated in Joe’s body. That’s how it happened, to their way of thinking.

After that news, and also at Charlie’s insistence, they had performed a kind of exorcism ritual (they had not put it like that) designed to drive any reincarnated soul out of Joe, leaving the original inhabitant, which was the only one Charlie wanted in there. But now he was beginning to wonder if all that had been a good idea. Maybe, he was beginning to think, his original Joe had in fact been the very personality that the Khembalis had driven out.

Not that Joe was all that different. Anna declared his fever was gone, and he was therefore more relaxed, and that his moodiness was much as before.

Only to Charlie he was clearly different, in ways he found hard to characterize to himself—but chiefly, the boy was now too content with things as they were. His Joe had never been like that, not since the very moment of his birth, which from all appearances had angered him greatly. Charlie could still remember seeing his little red face just out of Anna, royally pissed off and yelling.

But none of that now. No tantrums, no imperious commands. He was calm, he was biddable; he was even inclined to take naps. It just wasn’t his Joe.

Given these new impressions, Charlie was not in the slightest inclined to want to put Joe in a new situation, thus confusing the issue even further. He wanted to hang out with him, see what he was doing and feeling; he wanted to study him. This was what parental love came down to, apparently, sometimes, especially with a toddler, a human being in one of the most transient and astonishing of all the life stages. Someone coming to consciousness!

But the world was no respecter of Charlie’s feelings. Later that morning his cell phone rang again, and this time it was Phil Chase himself.

“Charlie, how are you?”

“I’m fine, Phil, how are you? Are you getting any rest?”

“Oh yeah sure. I’m still on my postcampaign vacation, so things are very relaxed.”

“Uh huh, sure. That’s not what Roy tells me. How’s the transition coming?”

“It’s coming fine, as I understand it. I thought that was your bailiwick.”

Charlie laughed with a sinking feeling. Already he felt the change in Phil’s status begin to weigh on him, making the conversation seem more and more surreal. He had worked for Phil for a long time, but always while Phil had been a senator; Charlie had long since gotten used to the considerable and yet highly circumscribed power that Phil as senator had wielded. It had become normalized, indeed had become kind of a running joke between them, in that Charlie often had reminded Phil just how completely circumscribed his power was.

Now that just wasn’t going to work. The president of the United States might be many things, but unpowerful was not among them. Many of the administrations preceding Phil’s had worked very hard to expand the powers of the executive branch beyond what the constitutional framers had intended—which campaigns made a mockery of the “strict constitutionalist” talk put out by these same people when discussing what principles the Supreme Court’s justices should hold, and showed they preferred a secretive executive dictatorship to democracy, especially if the president were a puppet installed by the interested parties. But never mind; the result of their labors was an apparatus of power that if properly understood and used could in many ways rule the world. Bizarre but true: the president of the United States could rule the world, both by direct fiat and by setting the agenda that everyone else had to follow or be damned. World ruler. Not really, of course, but it was about as close as anyone could get. And how exactly did you joke about that?

“Your clothes are still visible?” Charlie inquired.

“To me they are. But look,” passing on a full riposte, as being understood in advance—although Phil could no doubt see the comedy of omnipotence as well as the comedy of constraint—“I wanted to talk to you about your position in the administration. Roy says you’re being a little balky, but obviously we need you.”

“I’m here already. I can talk twelve hours a day, if you like.”

“Well, but a lot of these jobs require more than that. They’re in-person jobs, as you know.”

“What do you mean, like which ones?”

“Well, like for instance head of the EPA.”

“WHAT?” Charlie shouted. He reeled, literally, in that he staggered slightly to the side, then listed back to catch himself. “Don’t you be scaring me, Phil! I hope you’re not thinking of making appointments as stupid as that! Jesus, you know perfectly well I’m not qualified for that job! You need a first-rate scientist for that one, a major researcher with some policy and administrative experience, we’ve talked about this already! Every agency needs to feel appreciated and supported to keep esprit de corps and function at the highest levels, you know that! Isn’t Roy reminding you? You aren’t making a bunch of stupid political appointments, are you?”

Phil was cracking up. “See? That’s why we need you down here!”

Charlie sucked down some air. “Oh. Ha ha. Very funny. Don’t be scaring me like that, Phil.”

“I was serious, Charlie. You’d be fine heading the EPA. We need someone there with a global vision of the world’s environmental problems. And we’ll find someone like that. But that wouldn’t be the best use for you, I agree.”

“Good.” Charlie felt as if a bullet had just whizzed by his head. He was quivering as he said, very firmly, “Let’s just keep things like they are with me.”

“No, that’s not what I mean, either. Listen, can you come down here and at least talk it over with me? Fit that into your schedule?”

Well, shit. How could he say no? This was his boss, also the president of the United States, speaking. But if he had to talk to him in person about it…. Hesighed. “Yeah, yeah, of course. Your wish is my demand.”

“Bring Joe, if you can, I’d enjoy seeing him. We can take him out for a spin on the Tidal Basin.”

“Yeah yeah.”

What else could he say?

The problem was that yeah yeah was pretty much the only thing you could say, when replying to the president of the United States making a polite request of you. Perhaps there had been some presidents who had established a limit there, by asking for impossible things and then seeing what happened; power could quickly bring out the latent sadism in the powerful; but if a sane and clever president wanted only ever to get yeses in response to his questions, he could certainly frame them to make it that way. That was just the way it was.

Certainly it was hard to say no to a president-elect inviting you and your toddler to paddle around the Tidal Basin in one of the shiny blue pedal boats docked on the east side of the pond.

And once on the water, it indeed proved very hard to say no to Phil. Joe was wedged between them, life-jacketed and strapped down by Secret Service agents in ways that even Anna would have accepted as safe. He was looking about blissfully; he had even been fully compliant and agreeable about getting into the life jacket and being tied down by the seat belting. It had made Charlie a bit seasick to watch. Now it felt like Phil was doing most of the pumping on the boat’s foot pedals. He was also steering.

Phil was always in a good mood on the water, rapping away about nothing, looking down at Joe, then over the water at the Jefferson Memorial, the most graceful but least emotional of the city’s memorials; beaming at the day, sublimely unaware of the people on the shore path who had noticed him and were exclaiming into their cell phones or taking pictures with them. The Secret Service people had taken roost on the paddleboat dock, and there were an unusual number of men in suits walking the shore among the tourists and joggers.

“Where I need you in the room,” Phil said out of the blue, “is when we gather a global-warming task force. I’ll be out of my depth in that crowd, and there’ll be all kinds of information and plans put forth. That’s where I’ll want your impressions, both real-time and afterward, to help me cross-check what I think. It won’t do to have me describe these things to you after the fact. There isn’t time for that, and besides I might miss the most important thing.”

“Yeah, well—”

“None of that! This task force will be as close to a Department of Science or a Department for the Environment as I can make. It’s going to set the agenda for a lot of what we do. It’ll be my strategy group, Charlie, and I’m saying I need you in it. Now, I’ve looked into the daycare facilities for children at the White House. They’re adequate, and we can get to work making them even better. Joe will be my target audience. You’d like to play all day with a bunch of kids, wouldn’t you Joe?”

“Yeah Phil,” Joe said, happy to be included in the conversation.

“We’ll set up whatever system works best for you, what do you think of that?”

“I like that,” Joe said.

Charlie started to mutter something about the Chinese women who buried their infants up to the neck in riverbank mud every day to leave them to go to work in the rice paddies, but Phil overrode him.

“Gymboree in the basement, if that’s what it takes! Laser tag, paintball wars—you name it! You’d like paintball wars, wouldn’t you Joe?”

“Big truck,” Joe observed, pointing at the traffic on Independence Avenue.

“Sure, we could have big trucks too. We could have a monster truck pull right on the White House lawn.”

“Monster truck.” Joe smiled at the phrase.

Charlie sighed. It really seemed to him that Joe should be shouting big trucks right now, or trying to escape and crawling around among the turning pedals underfoot, or leaping overboard to go for a swim. Instead he was listening peacefully to Phil’s banter, with an expression that said he understood just as much as he wanted to, and approved of it in full.

Ah well. Everyone changed. And in fact, that had been the whole point of the ceremony Charlie had asked the Khembalis to conduct! Charlie had requested it—had insisted on it, in fact! But without, he now realized, fully imagining the consequences.

Phil said, “So you’ll do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You more or less have to, right? I mean, you’re the one who first suggested that I run, when we were over at Lincoln.”

“Everyone was telling you that.”

“No they weren’t. Besides, you were first.”

“No, you were. I just thought it would work.”

“And you were right, right?”

“Apparently so.”

“So you owe me. You got me into this mess.”

Phil smiled, waved at some tourists as he made a broad champing turn back toward the other side of the Basin. Charlie sighed. If he agreed, he would not see Joe anywhere near as much as he was used to—an idea he hated. On the other hand, if he didn’t see him as much, he wouldn’t notice so often how much Joe had changed. And he hated that change.

So much to dislike! Unhappily he said, “I’ll have to talk to Anna about it first. But I think she’ll go for it. She’s pretty pro-work. So. Shit. I’ll give it a try. I’ll give it a few months, and see how it goes. By that time your task force should be on their way, and I can see where things stand and go emeritus if I need to.”

“Good.” And Phil pedaled furiously, almost throwing Charlie’s knees up into his chin with the force of his enthusiasm. He said, “Look, Joe, all the people are waving at you!”

Joe waved back. “Hi people!” he shouted. “Big truck, right there! Look! I like that big truck. That’s a good truck.”

And so: change. The inexorable emergence of difference in time. Becoming. One of the fundamental mysteries.

Charlie hated it. He liked being; he hated becoming. This was, he thought, an indicator of how happy he had been with the way things were, the situation as he had had it. Mister Mom—he had loved it. Just this last May he had been walking down Leland Street and had passed Djina, one of the Gymboree moms he knew, biking the other way, and he had called out to her “Happy Mother’s Day!” and she had called back, “Same to you!” and he had felt a glow in him that had lasted an hour. Someone had understood.

Of course the pure-mom routine of the 1950s was an Ozzie and Harriet nightmare, a crazy-making program so effective that the surprise was there were any moms at all in that generation who had stayed sane. Most of them had gone nuts in one way or another, because in its purest form that life was too constrained to the crucial but mindless daily chores of child-rearing and house maintenance—“uncompensated labor,” as the economists put it, but in a larger sense than what they meant with their idiot bean-counting. Coming in the fifties, hard on the heels of World War II’s shattering of all norms, its huge chaotic space of dislocation and freedom for young women, it must have felt like a return to prison after a big long breakout.

But that wasn’t the life Charlie had been leading. Along with the child care and the shopping and the housework had been his “real” work as a senatorial aide, which, even though it had been no more than a few phone conversations a day, had bolstered the “unreal” work of Mr. Momhood in a curious dual action. Eventually which work was “real” had become a moot point; the upshot was that he felt fulfilled, and the lucky and accidental recipient of a full life. Maybe even overfull! But that was what happened when Freud’s short list of the important things in life—work and love—were all in play.

He had had it all. And so change be damned! Charlie wanted to live on in this life forever. Or if not forever, then as long as the stars. And he feared change, as being the probable degradation of a situation that couldn’t be bettered.

But here it was anyway, and there was no avoiding it. All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived. This was what the Khembalis were always saying; it was one of the Buddhist basics. And now Charlie had to try to believe it.

So, the day came when he got up, and Anna left for work, then Nick for school; then it was Joe and Da’s time, the whole day spread before them like a big green park. But on this day, Charlie prepped them both to leave, while talking up the change in the routine. “Big day, Joe! We’re off to school and work, to the White House! They have a great daycare center there, it’ll be like Gymboree!”

Joe looked up. “Gymboree?”

“Yes, like Gymboree, but not it exactly.” Charlie’s mood plummeted as he considered the differences—not one hour but five, or six, or eight, or twelve—and not parents and children together, but the child alone in a crowd of strangers. And he had never even liked Gymboree!

More and more depressed, he strapped Joe into his stroller and pushed him down to the Metro. The tunnel walls were still discolored or even wet in places, and Joe checked everything out as on any other trip. This was one of their routines.

Phil himself was not installed in the White House yet, but the arrangements had been made for Joe to join the daycare there, after which Charlie would leave and walk over to the senate offices in the old Joiner’s Union building. Up and out of the Metro, into warm air, under low windy clouds. People scudded underneath them, hurrying from one shelter to the next before rain hit.

Charlie had gotten out at Smithsonian, and the Mall was almost empty, only a few runners in sight. He pushed Joe along faster and faster, feeling more and more desolate—unreasonably so, almost to the point of despair—especially as Joe continued to babble on happily, energized by the Mall and the brewing storm, no doubt expecting something like their usual picnic and play session. Hours that no matter how tedious they had seemed at the time were now revealed as precious islands in eternity, as paradises lost. And it was impossible to convey to Joe that today was going to be different. “Joe, I’m going to drop you off at the daycare center here at the White House. You’re going to get to play with the other kids and the teachers and you have to do what the teachers say for a long time.”

“Cool Dad. Play!”

“Yeah that’s right. Maybe you’ll love it.”

It was at least possible. Vivid in Charlie’s mind was Anna’s story about taking Nick to daycare for the first time, and seeing Nick’s expression of stoic resignation, which had pierced her so; Charlie had seen the look himself, taking Nick in those first few times. But Joe was no stoic, and would never resign himself to anything. Charlie was anticipating something more like chaos and disorder, perhaps even mayhem, Joe moving from protest to tirade to rampage. But who knew? The way Joe was acting these days, anything was possible. He might love it. He could be gregarious, and he liked crowds and parties. It was really more a matter of liking them too much, taking them too far.

In any case, in they went. Security check, and then inside and down the hall to the daycare center, a well-appointed and very clean place. Lots of little kids running around among toys and play structures, train sets and bookshelves and Legos and all. Joe’s eyes grew round. “Hey Dad! Big Gymboree!”

“That’s right, like Gymboree. Except I’m going to go, Joe. I’m going to go and leave you here.”

“Bye Dad!” And off he ran without a backward glance.