Sixty Days and Counting

-

PC: Morning Charlie. Have some coffee. Joe, do you want coffee?

JQ: Sure Phil.

CQ: How about hot chocolate.

PC: Oh yeah, that’s what I’m having.

JQ: Sure.

PC: Rain on our dawn patrol. Too bad. Although rain has gotten a lot more interesting than it used to be, hasn’t it?

CQ: Droughts will do that.

PC: Yes. But now is the winter of our wet content. Here you go, Joe. Here you go, Charlie. These south windows are big, aren’t they. I like looking at rain out the window. Here Joe, you can put those right here on the carpet. Good.

(Pause. Slurping.)

PC: So, Charlie, I’ve been thinking that we can’t afford to bog down like we kind of are. We have to go fast, so maybe we can’t afford to fight capital anymore. They’ve rigged the numbers and written the laws.

CQ: So, let me guess, now you want to make saving the world a capitalist project? You make it some kind of canny investment opportunity, with a great six-month rate of return?

PC: This is why you are one of my trusted advisors, Charlie. You can guess what I’m thinking right after I say it.

JQ: Ha Dad.

CQ: Ha yourself.

PC: So yes, that’s what you do. Without conceding that private ownership of the public trust is right, or even sensible, but only because it has bought up so much of the next thirty years. Heck it supposedly owns the world in perpetuity. We’ll change that later. Right now we have to harness it to our cause, and use it to solve our problem. If we can do that, then the capitalism we end up with won’t be the same one we began with anyway. The rescue operation is so much larger than anything else we’ve ever done that it will change everything.

CQ: Or so you hope!

PC: It’s what I’m going to try. I think we are more or less forced to try it that way. I don’t see any alternative. Really, if we don’t get the infrastructure and transport systems swapped out as fast as is physically possible, the world is cooked. It’s like our first sixty days never ended, but only keeps rolling over. It’s like sixty days and counting all the time. So we have to look to what we have now. And right now we have capitalism. So we have to use it.

CQ: I don’t see how.

PC: For one thing, capital has a lot of capital. And a lot of it they keep liquid and available for investment. It runs into trillions of dollars. They want to invest it. At the same time there’s an overproduction problem. They can make more than they can sell of lots of things. And so all capital of all kinds is on the hunt for a good investment, some thing or a service that isn’t already overproduced. Looking to maximize profit, which is the goal that all business executives are legally bound to pursue, or they can be fired and sued by their board of directors.

CQ: Yeah, but crisis recovery isn’t profitable, so what’s your point?

PC: My point is there’s an immense amount of capital, looking to invest in new production! Because capital accumulation really works, at least at first, but it works so well it fulfills every necessity for a target population, and then every desire, and so it stops growing so fast, and without maximum growth you can’t get maximum profits. So you need to find new markets. And so, this has been what has been going on for the last few hundred years, capital moving from product to product but also from place to place, and what we’ve got now as a result is hugely uneven development. Some places were developed centuries ago, and some of those have since been abandoned, as in the rust belts. Some places are newly developed and cranking, others are being developed and are in transition. And then there are places that have never been developed, even if their resources were extracted, and they’re pretty much still in the Middle Ages. And this is what globalization has been so far—capital moving on to new zones of maximized return. Some national government will be willing to waive taxes, or pay for the start-up costs, and certainly to give away land. And there’s usually also a very willing labor force—not completely destitute or uneducated, but, you know—hungry. So capital comes in and that feeds more investment because there are synergies that help everyone. And so the take-off region develops like crazy, growth is in double digits for like a generation or so. China is doing that now, that’s what’s killing them. And so pretty soon the new area gets fully developed too! People have their basic needs, and they’ve created local capital that competes for profits. Now they’re another labor force with raised expectations. The profit margin therefore goes down. It’s time to move on, baby! So they look around to see where they might alight next, and then they take off and leave.

CQ: The World Bank, in other words. That’s what I told them. I lost my mind. I took off my shoe and beat on their table.

PC: That’s right, that meeting was reported to me, and I wish I had been there to see it. First you laugh in the president’s face, and then you scream at the World Bank in a fury. That was probably backwards, but never mind. I’m glad you did it. I think the decapitation is going rather well over there. The midlevel was stuffed with idealistic young people who went there to change it from within, and now they’re getting the chance.

CQ: I hope you don’t tape these conversations.

PC: Why not? It makes it a lot easier to put them in my blog.

CQ: Come on, Phil. Do you want me to talk or not?

PC: You can be the judge of that, but right now I am enjoying laying out for us the latest from geographic economics. The theory of uneven development, have you read these guys?

CQ: No.

PC: You should. As they describe, capital finds a likely place to develop next, and boom off they go, see? Place to place. The people left behind either adjust to being on their own, or fall into a recession, or even fall into a full-on rust-belt collapse. Whatever happens to them, global investment capital will no longer be interested. That’s the point at which you begin to see people theorizing bioregionalism, as they figure out what the local region can provide on its own. They’re making a virtue out of necessity, because they’ve been developed and are no longer the best profit. And somewhere else the process has started all over.

CQ: So soon the whole planet will be developed and modernized and we’ll all be happy! Except for the fact that it would take eight Earths to support every human living at modern levels of consumption! So we’re screwed!

JQ: Dad.

PC: No, that’s right. That’s what we’re seeing. The climate change and environmental collapse are the start of us hitting the limits. We’re in the process of overshooting the carrying capacity of the planet, or the consumption level, or what have you.

CQ: Yes.

PC: And yet capitalism continues to vampire its way around the globe, determined to remain unaware of the problem it’s creating. Individuals in the system notice, but the system itself doesn’t notice. And some people are fighting to keep the system from noticing, God knows why. It’s a living I guess. So the system cries: It’s not me! As if it could be anything else, given that human beings are doing it, and capitalism is the way human beings now organize themselves. But that’s what the system claims anyway, It’s not me, I’m the cure! and on it goes, and pretty soon we’re left with a devastated world.

CQ: I’m wondering where you’re taking this. So far it’s not sounding that good.

PC: Well, think about both parts of what I’ve been saying. The biosphere is endangered and so are humans. Meanwhile capitalism needs undeveloped regions that are ripe for investment. So—saving the environment IS the next undeveloped country! It’s sustainability that works as the next big investment opportunity! It’s massive, it’s hungry for growth, people want it. People need it.

CQ: The coral reefs need it. People don’t care.

PC: No, people care. People want it, of course they do. And capital always likes a desire it can make into a market. Heck, it will make up desires from scratch if it needs to, so real ones are welcome. So it’s a good correlation, a perfect fit of problem and solution. A marriage made in heaven.

CQ: Phil please, don’t be perverse. You’re saying the problem is the solution, it’s doubletalk. If it were true, why isn’t it happening already then?

PC: It isn’t the easiest money yet. Capital always picks the low-hanging fruit first, as being the best rate of return at that moment. Maximum profit is usually found in the path of least resistance. And right now there are still lots of hungry undeveloped places. And we haven’t yet run out of fossil carbon to burn. Heck, you know the reasons—it would be a bit more expensive to do the start-up work on this country called sustainability, so the profit margin is low at first, and since only the next quarter matters to the system, it doesn’t get done.

CQ: Right, and so?

PC: So that’s where government of the people, by the people, and for the people comes into the picture! And we in the United States have the biggest and richest and most powerful government of the people, by the people, and for the people in the whole world! It’s a great accomplishment for democracy, often unnoticed—we have to call people’s attention to that, Charlie. We the people have got a whole lot of the world’s capital sloshing around, owned by us. The GOVERNMENT is the COMMONS. Heck, we’re so big we can PRINT MONEY! It took Keynes to teach the economists how that power could be put to use, but really governments of the people, by the people, and for the people have known what this means all along. It’s the power to do things. So, we the people can aim capitalism in any direction we want, first by setting the rules for its operation, and second by leading the way with our own capital into new areas, thus creating the newest regions of maximum profitability. So the upshot is, if we can get Congress to commit federal capital first, and also to erect certain strategic little barriers to impede the natural flow of capital to the path of least resistance but maximum destruction, then we might be able to change the whole watershed.

CQ: How many metaphors are you going to mix into this stew?

PC: They are all part of a heroic simile, obviously, having to do with landscape and gravity. A very heroic simile, if I may say so.

JQ: Heroic!

PC: That’s right Joe. You are a good kid. You are a patriotic American toddler. So Charlie, can you write me some speeches putting this into inspiring and politically correct terminology?

CQ: Why do you have to be politically correct anymore? You’re the president!

PC: So I am. More coffee? More hot chocolate?

-

ONE DAY AN E-MAIL CAME FROM LEO Mulhouse, out in San Diego, forwarding a review paper about nonviral insertion. The RRCCES lab had gotten some really good results in introducing an altered DNA sequence into mice using three- and four-metal nanorods. In essence, Frank judged, the long-awaited targeted delivery system was at hand.

He stared at the paper. There were a bunch of other reasons piling up to go out to San Diego again. And San Diego was only one of several places he wanted to visit in person, or was being asked to visit. Taken together they implied much more travel than he had time to accomplish; he didn’t know exactly what to do, and so went nowhere, and the problem got worse. It wasn’t quite like his indecision fugue state; it was just a problem. But it was Diane who suggested that he string all the trips together in a quick jaunt around the world, dropping in on Beijing, the Takla Makan, Siberia, and England. He could start with San Diego, and the White House travel office could package it so it would only take him a couple of weeks at the most. A meeting, two conferences, and three on-site inspections.

So he agreed, and then the day of his departure was upon him, and he had to dig out his passport and get his visas and other documents from the travel office, and put together a travel bag and jump on the White House shuttle out to Dulles.

As soon into his flight as he could turn on his laptop, he checked out a video attachment in an e-mail that had come in from Wade Norton right before departure. The little movie appeared boxed in the middle of his screen, miniaturized so that Wade could show quite a lot. There was even a soundtrack—the opening shot, of the Antarctic coastline, was accompanied by a hokey high-wind and bird-cry combination, even though the sea looked calm and there were no birds in sight. The black rock of the coastline was filigreed with frozen white spume, a ragged border separating white ice and blue water. Summer again in Antarctica. The shot must have been taken from a helicopter, hovering in place.

Then Wade’s voice came over the fake sound: “See, there in the middle of the shot? That’s one of the coastal installations.”

Finally Frank saw something other than coastline: a line of metallic blue squares. Photovoltaic blue. “What you see covers about a football field. The sun is up twenty-four/seven right now. Ah, there’s the prototype pump, down there in the water.”

More metallic blue: in this case, thin lines, running from the ocean’s edge up over the black rocks, past the field of solar panels on the nearby ice, and then on up the broad tilted road of the Leverett Glacier toward the polar cap. At this pixel level the lines very quickly became invisible to the eye.

“Heated pumps and heated pipelines. It’s the latest oil tech, developed for Alaska and Russia. And it’s looking good, but now we need a lot more of it. And a lot more shipping. The pipes are huge. You probably can’t tell from these images, but the pipes are like sewer mains. They’re as big as they could make them and still get them on the ships. Apparently it helps the thermal situation to have them that big. So they’re taking in like a million gallons an hour, and moving it at about ten miles an hour up the glacier. The pipeline runs parallel to the polar overland route, that way they have the crevasses already dealt with. I rode with Bill for a few days on the route, it’s really cool. So there you have your proof of concept. It’s working just like you’d want it to. They’ve mapped all the declivities in the polar ice, and the oil companies are manufacturing the pumps and pipes and all. They’re loving this plan, as you can imagine. The only real choke points in the process now are speed of manufacture and shipping and installation. They haven’t got enough people who know how to do the installing. That’ll all have to ramp up. I’ve been running the numbers with Bill and his gang, and every system like this one can put ten cubic kilometers a year of water up on the polar cap. So depending on how fast the West Antarctic Ice Sheet breaks up, you would need some thousands of these systems to get the water back up onto the polar plateau, although really they should be spread out elsewhere in the world, because these will only run during the six months the sun is up.”

Here Frank got curious enough to get on the plane’s phone and call Wade directly. He had no idea what time it was in Antarctica, he didn’t even know how they told time down there, but he figured Wade must be used to calls at all hours by now, and probably turned his phone off when he didn’t want to get them.

But Wade picked up, and their connection was good, with what sounded like about a second in transmission delay.

“Wade, it’s Frank Vanderwal, and I’m looking at that e-mail you sent with the video of the prototype pumping system.”

“Oh yeah, hi Frank. How are you? Isn’t that neat? I helo’ed out there day before yesterday, I think it was.”

“Yeah it’s neat,” Frank said. “But tell me, does anyone down there have any idea how frozen sea water is going to behave on the polar cap?”

“Oh sure. It’s kind of a mess, actually. You know, when water freezes the ice is fresh and the salt gets extruded, so there are layers of salt above and below and inside the new ice, so it’s kind of slushy or semifrozen. So the spill from the pumps really spreads flat over the surface of the polar cap, which is good, because then it doesn’t pile up in big domes. Then in that layer the salts kind of clump and rise together, and get pushed onto the surface, so what you end up with is a mostly solid fresh water ice layer, with a crust of salt on top of it, like a devil’s golf-course-type feature. Then the wind will blow that salt down the polar cap, and disperse it as a dust that will melt or abrade surface ice, and whatever stays loose will blow off the polar cap in the katabatic winds. So, back into the ocean again! Pretty neat, eh?”

“Interesting,” Frank said.

“Yeah. If we build enough of these pumping systems, it really will be kind of a feat. I mean, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will eventually all fall into the ocean, it looks like, or most of it. No one can see that stopping now. But we might be able to pump the equivalent in water back onto the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, where it’ll stay frozen and stabilized.”

“So what about the desert basins in the north thirties?” Frank said. “A lot of those are turning into salt lakes. It’ll be like a bunch of giant Salton Seas.”

“Is that bad?”

“I don’t know, what do you think about that? Isn’t the Salton Sea really sick?”

“I guess so, but that’s because it’s drying up again, right? And getting saltier? Run one of these systems to the Salton Sea and its problems would be over. I think you have to keep pumping water into this kind of a sea, to keep it from getting too salty and eventually turning back into a playa. Maybe in a few hundred years you could let that happen, if you wanted. I bet by then you wouldn’t. They’ll be hydrating the areas downwind, don’t you think?”

“Would that be good?”

“More water? Probably good for people, right? It wouldn’t be good for arid desert biomes. But maybe people figure we have enough of those already. I mean, desertification is a big problem in some regions. If you were to create some major lakes in the western Sahara, it might slow down the desertification of the Sahel. I think that’s what the ecologists are talking about now anyway. It’s a big topic of conversation among the beakers down here. They’re loving all this stuff. I sometimes think they love it that the world is falling apart. It makes the earth sciences all the rage now. They’re like the atomic physicists were in World War Two.”

“I suppose they are. But on the other hand…”

“Yeah, I know. Better if we didn’t have to do all this stuff. Since we do, though, it’s good we’ve got some options.”

“I hope this doesn’t give people the feeling that we can just silver-bullet all the problems and go on like we were before.”

“No. Well, we can think about crossing that bridge if we get to it in the first place.”

“True.”

“Have to hope the bridge is still there at that point.”

“True.”

“So you’re flying where?”

“I’m on my way around the world.”

“Oh cool. When are you going to meet with Phil about these pumps?”

“Diane will do it.”

“Okay good. Say hi to him, or have her say hi to him. It’s been a lot harder to get him on the phone since he got elected.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I keep telling him to come down here and see for himself, and he always says he will.”

“I’m sure he wants to.”

“Yeah he would love it.”

“So Wade, are you still seeing that woman down there?”

“It’s complicated. Are you still seeing that woman in D.C.?”

“It’s complicated.”

Satellite hiss, as they both were cast into thoughts of their own—then short and unhumorous laughs from both of them, and they signed off.

In San Diego, Frank rented a van and drove up to UCSD, checking in at the department to collect mail and meet with his remaining grad students. From there he walked up North Torrey Pines Road to RRCCES.

The labs were back, fully up and running, crowded, not messy but busy. A functioning lab was a beautiful thing to behold. A bit of a Fabergé egg; fragile, rococo, needing nurturance and protection. A bubble in a waterfall. Science in action. In these, they changed the world.

And now—

Yann came in and they got down to the latest. “You have to go to Russia,” Yann said.

“I am.”

“Oh! Well good. The Siberian forest is amazing. It’s so big that even the Soviets couldn’t cut it all down. We flew from Cheylabinsk to Omsh and it just went on and on and on.”

“And your lichen?”

“It’s way east of where we spread it. The uptake has been just amazing. It’s almost even scary.”

“Almost?”

Yann laughed defensively. “Yeah, well, given the problems I see you guys are having shifting away from carbon, a little carbon drawdown overshoot might not be such a bad thing, right?”

Frank shook his head. “Who knows? It’s a pretty big experiment.”

“Yeah it is. Well, you know, it’ll be like any other experimental series, in that sense. We’ll see what we get from this one and then try another one.”

“The stakes are awfully high.”

“Yeah true. Good planets are hard to find.” Yann shrugged. “But maybe the stakes have always been high, you know? Maybe we just didn’t know it before. Now we know it, and so maybe we’ll, I don’t know. Do them a little more…”

“Carefully? Like by putting in suicide genes or other negative feedback constraints? Or environmental safeguards?”

Yann shrugged, embarrassed. “Yeah sure.”

He changed the subject, with a look heavenward as if to indicate that what the Russians had done was beyond his control. “But look here, I’ve been working on those gene-expression algorithms some more, and I’ve seen a wrinkle in the palindrome calculation. I want you to take a look at it see what you think.”

“Sure,” Frank said.

They went into Yann’s office, a cubicle just like any other office cubicle, except that the window’s view was of the Pacific Ocean from three hundred feet above sea level. Yann clicked his mouse as rapidly as a video game player and brought up pages that worked like transparencies, one colored pattern after another, until it looked like the London tube map replicated a few times around a vertical axis. As he continued to click, this cat’s cradle rotated more on the axis, so that a really good false sense of three dimensions was established. He squished that image into the top of his huge screen and then on the bottom began to write out the equations for the middle steps of his algorithm. It was like working through a cipher set in which the solution to each step cast a wave of probabilities that then had to be explored and in some cases solved before the next step could be formulated; and then again like that, through iterations within sets, and decision-tree choices to determine the steps that properly followed. Algorithms, in short; or in long. They dug in, and Yann talked and drew on a whiteboard and clicked on the mouse, and typed like a madman, speed-talking all the while, free-associating as well as running a quick tutorial for Frank in his latest thinking, Frank squinting, frowning, asking questions, nodding, scribbling himself, asking more questions. Yann was now the leader of the pack, no doubt about it. It was as it would have been watching Richard Feynman chalkboarding quantum chromodynamics for the first time. A new understanding of some aspect of the unfolding of the world in time. Here they were in the heart of science, the basic activity, the mathematics of alchemy, discovered in the equations, matched against reality, and examined for its own internal logic as math.

“I have to pee,” Yann announced midequation, and they broke for the day. Suddenly it was dinnertime.

“That was good,” Frank said. “Jesus, Yann. I mean, do you know what you’re saying here?”

“Well, I think so. But you tell me. I only learn what this stuff might mean when you tell me. You and Leo.”

“Because it depends on what he can do.”

“Right. Although he’s not the insertion guy, as he’s always saying.”

“Which is what we need now.”

“Well, that’s more Marta and Eleanor. They’re doing their thing, and they’re hooked into a whole network of people doing that.”

“So those nanorods are working?” Frank said, looking at one of the shotgun sequencers.

“Yeah. They’ll tell us about it if we go up to the Paradigms for drinks. The gang usually meets there around this time on Fridays.”

“Nice.”

“But first let’s go talk to Leo, and then we can tell him to join us too.”

“Good idea.”

Leo was in his office reading an online paper with lots of tables and false-color photos. “Oh hi guys, hi Frank. Out here again I see.”

“Yes, I’m doing some other stuff too, but I wanted to check in and see how things are coming along.”

“Things are coming along fine.” Leo had the kind of satisfied, paws-dug-in look of a dog with a bone. Still looking at the screen as he spoke with them. “Eleanor and Marta are putting the triple nanorods through all kinds of trials.”

“So it’s nanotechnology at last.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Although I’ve never seen how nanotechnology isn’t just what we used to call chemistry. But anyway here I am using it.”

“So these nanorods are taking your DNA into mice?”

“Yes, the uptake is really good, and the rods don’t do anything but cross over and give up their attached DNA, so they’re looking like very good insertion agents. The best I’ve seen anyway.”

“Wow.”

Yann described to Leo some of his new work on the algorithm.

“Combine the two advances,” Frank murmured. “And…”

“Oh yeah,” Leo said, smiling hungrily. “Very complementary. It could mean—” And he waved a hand expressively. Everything.

“Let’s go get that drink,” Yann said.

Marta was looking good, although Frank was inoculated. She had been out in the water that day, and it was a truism among surfers that salt water curled hair attractively. Bad hair became good hair, good hair became ravishing. People paid fortunes to salons to get that very look. And of course the sunburn and bleaching, the flush in the skin. “Hi, Frank” she said and pecked him hard on the cheek, like taking a bite out of him. “How’s it going out in the nation’s capital?”

He glowered at her. “It’s going well, thanks,” Ms. Poisoner.

“Right.” She laughed at his expression and they went into the bar.

Eleanor joined them; she too was looking good. Frank ordered a frozen margarita, a drink he never drank more than a mile away from the California coastline. They all decided to join him and it became a pitcher, then two. Frank told them about developments in D.C., and they told him what they had been hearing from Russia, also the lab news, and the latest on North County. Leo took the lead here, being utterly exposed by events; he and his wife lived right on the cliffs in Leucadia, and were embroiled in the legal battle between the neighborhood and the city of Encinitas as to what should be done. The city was a political fiction, made from three coastal villages, Leucadia, Encinitas, and Cardiff, which gloried in the full name of Cardiff-by-the-Sea (now often changed to Cardiff-in-the-Sea, even though only its beach restaurants had actually washed away). Now it was beginning to look like a civic divorce was in order, Leo said. All the cliffside houses in Leucadia had been condemned, or at least the cliff legally abandoned by the city, and it was uncertain really what was going on given all the lawsuits, but for sure it was making for huge insurance and liability problems, and the involvement of the California Coastal Commission and the state legislature. A lot of Leucadia depended on the outcome.

“It sounds awful.”

“Yeah, well. It’s still a great place to live. When I’m lying there in bed and I hear the surf, or when the hang-gliders come by our porch asking about tide times—or we see the green flash, or the dolphins bodysurfing—well, you know. It makes the legal stuff seems pretty small. I figure we’ve already seen the worst we’re likely to see.”

“So you’re not trying to sell?”

“Oh hell no. That would be an even bigger problem. No, we’re there for good. Or until the house falls in the water. I just don’t think it will.”

“Are other people there trying to sell?”

“Sure, but that’s part of the problem, because of what the city’s done. Some people are still managing to do it, but I think both parties have to sign all kinds of waivers acknowledging the lawsuits and such. Those that do manage to sell are getting hardly anything for them. They’re almost all for sale by owner. Agents don’t want to mess with it. People are freaked out.”

“But you think it will be okay.”

“Well, physically okay. If there’s another really big storm, we’ll see. But I think our part of the street is on a kind of hard rib in the sandstone, to tell you the truth. We’re a little bit higher. It’s like a little point.”

“Sounds lucky.” Marta was looking at him, so he said, “How is your lichen doing in Siberia?”

She crowed. “It’s going great! Get ready for an ice age!”

“Uh oh.”

But she was not to be subdued, especially not after the second pitcher arrived. The lichen had taken hold in the Siberian forest east of Cheylabinsk, with coverage estimates of thousands of hectares, and millions of trees, each tree potentially drawing down several hundred kilograms of carbon more than it would have. “I mean, do the math!”

“You might have to release methane to keep things warm enough,” Leo joked.

“Unless the trees die,” Frank said, but under his breath so that no one noticed. Yann was looking a little uncomfortable as it was. He knew Frank thought the experiment had been irresponsible.

“It’s getting so wild,” Eleanor said.

Leo’s wife Roxanne joined them, and they ate dinner at a beach restaurant by the train station. A convivial affair. Wonderful to see how results in the lab could cheer a group of scientists. Afterward Leo and Roxanne went home, and Frank nodded to Marta and Yann’s invitation to join them and Eleanor again at the Belly-Up. “Sure.”

Off to the Belly-Up. Into the giant Quonset, loud and hot. Dance dance dance. Don’t take any pills from Marta. Eleanor was a good dancer, and she and Marta bopped together as a team. She had an arm tattoo which Frank saw clearly for the first time: a Medusa head with its serpentine hair and glare, and a circle of script around it; above it read Nolo mi tangere, below, Don’t Fuck With Me. Yann disappeared, Eleanor and Marta danced near Frank, occasionally turning to him for a brief pas-de-troix, hip-bumping, tummy-bumping, chest-bumping, oh yes. Easy to do when you had eaten the antidote!

Then off into the night. A pattern already. The habit was formed with the second iteration. Frank drove to his storage locker and then out to the coast highway and south to Black’s, remembering the wild ride with the horrible hard-on. So much for Marta. He laid out his bed on the cliff in his old nook. He sat there slowly falling asleep. Maybe the third good correlation was the simultaneous development of the proteomics algorithm with the targeted insertion delivery. It was the best night’s sleep he had had in months.

-

HIS FLIGHT OUT THE NEXT DAY left in the afternoon, so the next morning he went back to his locker to stash his night gear and pick up his water stuff, then drove to the department office on campus to finish all his business there.

When he was done he gave Leo a call. “Hey Leo, when Derek was on the hunt right before Torrey Pines got sold, did you ever go out and do the dog and pony with him?”

“Yeah I did, a few times.”

“Did you ever meet anyone interesting in that process?”

“Well, let me think…. That was a pretty crazy time.” After a long pause he said, “There was a guy we met near the end, a venture capitalist named Henry Bannet. He had an office in La Jolla. He asked some good questions. He knew what he was talking about, and he was, I don’t know. Intense.”

“Do you remember the name of his firm?”

“No, but I can google him.”

“True. But I can do that too.”

Frank thanked him and got off, then googled Henry Bannet and got a list in 2.3 seconds. The one on the website for a firm called Biocal seemed right. A couple more taps and the receptionist at Biocal was answering the phone. She put him through, and no more than fifteen seconds after he had started his hunt, he was talking to the man himself, cell phone to cell phone it sounded like.

Frank explained who he was and why he was calling, and Bannet agreed to look into the matter, and meet with him next time he was in town.

After that Frank put his bathing suit and fins in his daypack and walked down to La Jolla Farms Road, and then down the old asphalt road to Black’s Beach.

Being under its giant sandstone cliff gave Black’s a particular feel. Change into bathing suit, out into the swell, “Oooooop! Oooooop!” Fins tugged on and out he swam, tasting the old salt taste as he went. Mother Ocean, salty and cool. The swell was small and from the south. There weren’t any well-defined breaks at Black’s, but shifting sandbars about a hundred yards offshore broke up the incoming waves, especially when the swell was from the south. Presumably the great cliff itself provided the sand for the sandbars, as it did for the beach, which was much wider than most of North County’s beaches these days, even Del Mar’s.

Outside it was classic Black’s. Swells reared up suddenly, hollowed slowly, broke with sharp clean reports. Long slow lefts, short fast rights. Frank swam and rode, swam and rode, swam and rode. It was like knowing how to ride a bicycle—no thinking to it, once you got back into it. What had Emerson said about surfing? All human life was like this.

On the beach a young couple had just arrived. The guy had on long flowing white pants and a long-sleeved white shirt, also a wide-brimmed white hat, and a long yellow scarf or burnoose wrapped high around his neck. He even had on white gloves. Some issues with sun, it appeared, and what Frank could see of his face was albino pink. His companion was twirling around him in ecstatic circles, swinging her long black hair around and pulling off her clothes—shirt over her head and thrown at him, pants pulled off and handed to him. She danced around him naked, arms extended, then dashed out into the surf.

Well, that was Black’s Beach for you. Frank stroked out and caught another wave, singing Spencer’s song about the VW van: I would fight for hippie chicks, I would die for hippie chicks. Inshore the woman dove into the broken waves while her companion stood knee deep, watching her impassively. An odd couple—

But weren’t they all!

After that, it was on to Asia. First a flight up to Seattle, then a long shot to Beijing. Frank slept as much as he could, then got some views of the Aleutians seen through clouds, followed by a pass over the snowy volcano-studded ranges of Kamchatka.

The Beijing meeting, called Carbon Expo Asia, was interesting. It was both a trade show and a conference on carbon emissions markets, sponsored by the International Emissions Trading Association, and among those speaking were governmental representatives involved in establishing and regulating them. Carbon, of course, was a commodity with a futures market (as Frank himself had been, and maybe still was). With Phil Chase in office, the world had assumed the U.S. would be joining the global carbon cap and trade market, dragging Australia and the other recalcitrants in their AP6 with it, and so the value of carbon emissions on the carbon futures market had soared. All countries would set caps and then the trading would be fully globalized, and in theory trading and prices would take off. Now, however, the futures traders were beginning to wonder if carbon might become so sharply capped, or the burning of it become so old-tech, that emissions would be abandoned outright and lose all value in a market collapse. So there were countervailing pressures coming to bear on the daily price and its prognosis, as in any futures market. Discussions at this very meeting had caused the price on the European market to rise a few euros, to 22 euros a share.

All these pressures were on display here for Frank to witness. Naturally Chinese traders were especially prominent, and behind them the Chinese government appeared to be calling the shots. They were trying to bump the present value of emissions futures, the local American trade representative explained to Frank, by holding China’s potential coal burning over everyone else’s head, as a kind of giant environmental terrorist threat. By threatening to burn their coal they hoped to create all kinds of concessions, and essentially get their next generation of power plants paid for by the rest of the global community. Or so went the threat. Thus the Chinese bureaucrats wandered the conference halls looking fat and dangerous, as if explosives were strapped to their waists, implying with their looks and their cryptic comments that if their requirements were not met they would explode their carbon and cook the world.

The United States meanwhile still had the biggest carbon burn ongoing, and from time to time in the negotiations could threaten to claim that it was proving harder to cut back than they had thought. So all the big players had their cards, and in a way it was a case of mutual assured destruction all over again. Everyone had to agree on the need to act, or it wouldn’t work for any of them. So all the carbon traders and diplomats were in the halls dealing, the Americans as much as anyone. Indeed they, as the newcomers to the table, seemed the ones most desperate for a global deal. It was like a giant game of chicken. And in a game of chicken everyone thought the Chinese would win. They were bloody-minded hardball players in general, and only ten or a dozen guys there had to hold their nerve, rather than three hundred million; that was an eight-magnitude difference, and should be enough to guarantee China could hold firm the longest. If you believed the theory that the few were stronger in will than the many.

It was an interesting test of America’s true strength, now that Frank thought of it that way. Did the bulk of the world’s capital still reside in the U.S.? Did the U.S.’s military strength matter at all in this other world of energy technology? Was it a case of dominance without hegemony, as some were describing it, so that in the absence of a war, America was nothing but one more decrepit empire, falling by history’s wayside? If America stopped burning 25 percent of the total carbon burned every year, would this make the country geopolitically stronger or weaker? One would have to find a perspective to measure situations which took into account many disparate factors that were not usually calculated together. It was a geopolitical mess to rival the end of World War II, and the delicate negotiations establishing the UN.

Then the meeting was over, with lots of emissions trading done, but little accomplished toward the global treaty that would replace Kyoto, and which hopefully would limit very sharply the total annual amount of emissions allowed for the whole world. That was becoming the usual way with these meetings, the American rep told Frank wearily at the end. Once you were making what could be called progress (meaning another way to make money, it seemed to Frank), no one was inclined to push for anything more radical.

Frank then caught a Chinese flight down to the Takla Makan desert, in far western China—a turbulent couple of hours—and landed at Khotan, an oasis town on the southern edge of the Tarim Basin. There he was loaded with some Hungarian civil engineers into a minibus and driven north, to the shores of the new salt sea. Throughout the drive plumes of dust, as if from a volcanic explosion, rose in the sky ahead of them. As they approached, the yellow wall of rising dust became more transparent, and finally was revealed as the work of a line of gigantic bulldozers, heaving a dike into place on an otherwise empty desert floor. It looked like the Great Wall was being reproduced at a magnitude larger scale.

Frank got out at a settlement of tents, yurts, mobile homes, and cinder block structures, all next to an ancient dusty tumbledown of brown brick walls. He was greeted there by a Chinese-American archeologist named Eric Chung, with whom he had exchanged e-mails.

Chung took him by jeep around the old site. The actual dig occupied only a little corner of it. The ruins covered about a thousand acres, Chung told him, and so far they had excavated ten.

Everything in sight, from horizon to horizon, was a shade of brown: the Kunlun Mountains rising to the south, the plains, the bricks of the ruin, and in a slightly lighter shade, the newly exposed bricks of the dig.

“So this was Shambhala?” Frank said.

“That’s right.”

“In what sense, exactly?”

“That was what the Tibetans called it while it existed. That arroyo and wash you see down the slope was a tributary of the Tarim River, and it ran all year round, because the climate was wetter and the snow pack on the Kunluns was thicker, and there were glaciers. They’re saying that flooding the Tarim Basin may bring glaciers back again, by the way, so that this river would run again, which is one of the reasons we have to get the dig at the lower points done fast. Anyway, it was a very advanced city, the center of the kingdom of Khocho. Powerful and prominent in that time. It was located on a precursor of the Silk Road, and existed on trade and so on. A very rich culture. So the Bön people in Tibet considered it to be the land of milk and honey, and when the Buddhist monasteries took over up there, they developed a legend that this was a magical city, and Guru Rimpoche started the Shambhala motif in their iconography. It reminds me of the Atlantis myth, in that Plato wrote a thousand years after the explosion at Thera, but still described certain aspects of the Minoan colony on the island pretty well, especially the circular shape of the island. In this case the time lag is about the same, and Shambhala was always described in the literature as being square, with the corners at the four cardinal points, and surrounded by water. What we’re finding here are irrigation ditches that leave the riverbed upstream from the site, and circle it and rejoin the river downstream. And the city is platted in a square that is oriented north-south-east-west. So it fits the pattern, it has the name, it’s the right period. So, that’s the sense in which we call it Shambhala.”

“Wow. So it’s like finding Troy, or Thera.”

“Yes, exactly. A very exciting find. And the Chinese so far are being pretty good about it. The dike holding in this part of the new sea has been rerouted to keep the site out of the water. And between the site and the new lake it looks like they are hoping to create a new tourist destination, linked to the Tibet tour. We’re already seeing some Shangri-La hotels and travel companies springing up out here.”

“Amazing,” Frank said. “I wonder if it will catch on.”

“Who knows? But at least we won’t have to hurry to excavate a site that’s going to be drowned. I did that in Turkey, and it’s a terrible experience.”

Frank walked around the site with the man. “How old is it, did you say?”

“Eighth century.”

“And was it founded by a Rudra Cakrin?”

“Yes, that’s right. Very good.”

“But I read that he founded the city in sixteen thousand BC?”

“Yes,” Chung said, laughing, “they do say that, but it’s the same with Plato saying Atlantis was ten thousand years old and a hundred miles across. These stories appear to get exaggerated by a factor of ten.”

“Interesting.” They walked past a big cleared area of the dig. “This was a temple site?”

“Yes, we think so.”

Frank took from his daypack a pill bottle containing some of Rudra’s ashes that Qang had given him. He opened it and cast the fine gray ash into the wind. The little cloud puffed and drifted away onto the ground, more dust to add to all the rest. Maybe it would skew some numbers if they ever did any carbon-14 dating.

“Enough,” Frank said.

An Aeroflot flight then, during which he caught sight of the Aral Sea, which apparently was already twice as big as before its own flooding project had begun, thus almost back to the size it had been before people began diverting its inflow a century before. All kinds of landscape-restoration experiments were being conducted by the Kazakhs and Uzbeks around the new shoreline, which they had set legally in advance and which now was almost achieved. From the air the shoreline appeared as a ring of green, then brown, around a lake that was light brown near the shoreline, shading to olive, then a murky dark green, then blue. It looked like a vernal pool.

Later the plane landed and woke Frank with a cacophony of creaks and groans. Frank got off and was greeted by an American and Russian team from Marta and Yann’s old company, Small Delivery Systems. It was cold, and there was a dusting of dirty snow on the ground. Winter in Siberia! Although in fact it was not that cold and seemed rather dry and brown.

They drove off in a caravan of four long gray vans or tall station wagons, something like Soviet Land Rovers, it seemed, creaky like the plane, but warm and stuffy. People were starting to drive them on the frozen rivers again, he was told. Now they progressed over a road that was not paved but did have fresh pea gravel spread over it, and a coating of frost. The vehicles had to keep a certain distance from each other to avoid having their windshields quickly pitted.

Not far from the airport the road led them into a forest of scrubby pines. It looked like Interstate 95 in Maine, except that the road was narrower, and unpaved, and the trees therefore grayed by the dust thrown up by passing traffic. They were somewhere near Cheylabinsk 56, someone said. You don’t want to go there, a Russian added. One of Stalin’s biggest messes. Somewhere southeast of the Urals, Frank saw on a cell-phone map.

Their little caravan stopped in a clearing that included a gravel parking lot and a row of cabins. They got out, and the locals led the rest of them to a broad path leading into the woods. Quickly Frank saw that the roadside dust and frost had obscured the fact that all the trees in this forest had another coating: not dust, but lichen.

It was Small Delivery Systems’ lichen. Frank saw now why Marta had been not exactly boasting, nor abashed, nor exuberant, nor defensive, but some strange mixture of all these. Because she and Eleanor were the team that had engineered this tree lichen for the Russians, manipulating the fungal part of the symbiote so that it would colonize its host trees more quickly, and then alter the lignin balance of the trees in ways that changed their metabolism. Tree lichens had always done that to their hosts for their own purposes, but these did it faster and to a greater extent. The more lignin that got banked in the tree, the better the lichen did, but also the bulkier the root system became, and this increased the net carbon drawdown of individual trees by 7 or 10 percent. Cumulatively, a very big potential drawdown indeed.

And the lichen were obviously doing well, to the point where a balance had clearly been lost. There were forests Frank had seen in Canada where moss or lichen covered most of the trunks and branches. In particular he recalled a frondy, day-glo green moss that in places was very widespread. But this lichen plated everything: trunk, branches, twigs—everything but the pine needles themselves.

Such a thorough cloaking looked harmful. A shaft of sunlight cut through the clouds at an angle and hit some trees nearby, and their cladding of lichen made them gleam like bronze trees with their needles painted green.

The Small Delivery people out there with Frank were sanguine about all this. They did not think there would be a problem. They said the trees were not in danger. They said that even if some trees died, it would only be a bit of negative feedback to counter the carbon drawdown that was already working so well. If a certain percentage of trees also took on lignin so fast they split their trunks, or had roots rupture underground, or others were suffocated by the lichen growing over the budding points of the new needles, then that would slow any further runaway growth of the lichen. Things would then eventually reach a balance.

Frank wasn’t so sure. He did not think this was ecologically sound. Possibly the lichen could go on living on dead trees; certainly it could spread at the borders of the infestation to new trees. But these were not the people to talk to about this possibility.

The new lichen started out khaki, it appeared, and then caked itself with a second layer that was the dull bronze that eventually dominated. Like the cructose lichen of the high Sierra that you saw everywhere on granite, it was quite beautiful. The little bubbles of its surface texture had an insectile sheen. That was the fungus. Frank recalled a passage in Thoreau: “The simplest and most lumpish fungus has a peculiar interest to us, because it is so obviously organic and related to ourselves; matter not dormant, but inspired, a life akin to my own. It is a successful poem in its kind.”

Which was true; but to see it take over the life it was usually symbiotic with was not a good thing. It looked like the parts of Georgia where kudzu had for a time overgrown everything.

“Creepy,” Frank remarked, scraping at an individual bubble with a finger-nail. These were the tiny plutons of a different kind of batholith.

“Yes, it is kind of, isn’t it?”

“How do the roots look?”

“Come see for yourself.” They took him to an area where the soil had been removed from beneath some sample trees. Here they saw both before and after roots, as some trees had been girdled and killed and their roots exposed later, to give them baseline data. Near them some still living trees, or trees in the process of being killed by the root exposure, were standing in holes balanced on their lowest net of fine roots, leaving most of the root balls exposed. The root balls were still shallow, in the way of evergreens, but the lichen-infested trees had roots that were markedly thicker than the uninfested trees.

“We started by treating an area of about a thousand square kilometers, and now it’s about five thousand.”

“About the size of Delaware, in other words.”

Meaning some tens of millions of trees had been affected, and thus in the neighborhood of tens of millions of tons of carbon drawn down. Say a hundred million tons for the sake of thinking—that was about one percent of what they had put into the atmosphere in the year since the lichen was released.

Of course if it killed the forest, a lot of that carbon would then be eaten by microbes and respired to the atmosphere, some of it quickly, some over years, some over decades. This, Frank’s hosts assured him, given the situation they were in, was a risk worth taking. It was not a perfect nor a completely safe solution, but then again, none of them were.

Interesting to hear this reckless stuff coming from the Russians and the Small Delivery Systems people about equally, Frank thought. Who had persuaded whom was probably irrelevant; now it was a true folie à deux.

He had stood a thousand feet tall on the floor of the Atlantic; now it looked like he had been miniaturized, and was threading his way through a forest of mold in a Petri dish. “Really creepy,” he declared.

Certainly time to declare limited discussion. It was impossible to tease out the ramifications of all this, they depended so heavily on what happened to the various symbioses feeding each other, eating each other. There would need to be some kind of Kenzo modeling session, in which the whole range of possibilities got mapped, then the probabilities of each assessed. Feedback on feedback. It was very possibly incalculable, something they could only find out by watching what happened in real time, real space. Like history itself. History in the making, right out there in the middle of Siberia.

Then it was on to London, by way of Moscow, which he did not see at all. In his London hotel after the flights, he was jetlagged into some insomniac limbo, and could not sleep. It felt strange to have such a big bed at his command, and a room—oppressive, even decadent.

He checked his e-mail and then the internet. His browser’s home page news had a little item about Phil Chase and Diane opening a National Academy of Sciences meeting together. He smiled ruefully, almost a grimace, and clicked to Emerson, where a search using the word traveling brought up this:

From “Self-Reliance.” Frank laughed, then showered and went to bed, and in the midst of his giant’s weary buzzing, the luxury of lying horizontally suddenly took him away.

The conference he was attending was being held in Greenwich, near the Observatory, so that they could inspect in person, as an integral part of the conference, the Thames River Barrier. Witness the nature of the beast. The barrier was up permanently these days, forming a strangely attractive dam, composed of modular parts raised up from the river bottom, in a curve like a longbow. Ribbed arcs. One could walk out onto the first part of the broad concrete crescent, and from there it was very obvious to the eye that the seaward side, still a river, but opening like a funnel outward into the broader Thames estuary, was a plane of water distinctly higher than the plane of water on the London side. It was the opposite of the usual reservoir view, and reminded Frank of the walk he had taken with the Quiblers on the dike of Khembalung, right before the monsoon had returned and drowned the island.

Now he walked in that deracinated state characteristic of profound jetlag: sandy-eyed, mouth hung open in sleepy amazement, prone to sudden jolts of emotion. It was not particularly cold out, but the wind was raw; that was what kept him awake. When the group went back inside and took up the work on the sea-level issues, he fell asleep, unfortunately missing most of a talk he had really wanted to see, on the latest satellite-based laser altimetry measurements. An entire fleet of satellites and university and government departments had taken on the task of measuring sea level worldwide. Right before Frank fell asleep, the speaker said something about the sea-level rise slowing down lately, meaning their first pumping efforts might be having an effect, because other measurements showed the polar melting was continuing apace, in a feedback loop many considered unstoppable. This was fascinating, but Frank fell asleep anyway.

When he woke up he was chagrined, but realized he could see the paper online. The general upshot of the talk seemed to have been that they could only really stem the rise by drawing down enough CO₂ to get the atmosphere back to around 250 parts per million, levels last seen in the Little Ice Age from 1200–1400 AD. People were murmuring about the nerviness of the speaker’s suggestion that they try for an ice age, but as was said immediately in rejoinder, they could always burn some carbon to warm things if they got too cold. This was another reason to bank some of the oil that remained unburned.

“I can tell you right now my wife’s going to want you to set the thermostat higher,” someone prefaced his question, to general guffaws. They all seemed much more confident of humanity’s terraforming abilities than seemed warranted. It was a research crowd rather than a policy crowd, and so included a lot of graduate students and younger professors. The more weathered faces in the room were looking around and catching each other’s eye, then raising their eyebrows.

On the flight back from London, Frank saw that the plane had telephones in the back of the middle seats, and when he spotted the tip of the astonishing icescape that was Greenland, it occurred to him to give Wade Norton another call. He punched in the number, waited. Soon he would be talking to an acquaintance in Antarctica, while flying thirty thousand feet over the tip of Greenland. The technological sublime could be so trippy.

Wade picked up. “Hi Frank. Where are you?”

“I’m in an airliner going from London to New York, and I can see the tip of Greenland, and it still looks icy. It looks the same as always.”

“You need lasers to see the difference, except in certain fjords.”

“Is that the way it is down there too? Can you see the differences down there?”

“Well, the Ross Ice Shelf being gone is the main thing you can see. There’s still lots of ice on the land. And more all the time because of us, right?”

“Right, is that still going well?”

“Yes it is. There’s some maintenance to be done at the intakes, but by and large the prototypes are all pumping away, and they’re set to add more next season. They’re talking cubic kilometer this and cubic kilometer that—they’ve sure ramped up from gallons and cubic feet per second, did you notice?”

“Yeah sure. They had to—it was getting to be like Italian lira.”

“That’s right. Also, if you take away a few zeroes it doesn’t look out of control.”

“That’s true. Maybe that’s why the modelers at this conference were so confident we had some chance of climate stabilization.”

“Maybe so. Maybe they need to come down here and see some of the tabular bergs coming off.”

“Do you think just having that experience would change their calculations though?”

“Well, good question. But I think a lot of calculations are really trying to quantify certain assumptions, don’t you? Like in economics? Not as bad as that, of course, but still.”

“Maybe we can arrange for a conference in McMurdo.”

“Good idea! I mean, NSF would probably hate it, but maybe not. It might be good publicity. Good for the budget.”

“I’ll check with Diane about it.”

“Good. Hey, how’s it going with her?”

“Good. She and Phil seem good for each other.”

“Ah yeah, that’s nice. Phil needed someone.”

“Diane too. So hey, how’s it going with Val again?”

“Ah, well, good, good. Good when I see her. I’ll see her again in about a month.”

“Whoah. So, is she off with…?”

“Yes, I think she’s with X, for part of that time, anyway. She’s with some kind of polar cap sailing village.”

“What did you say?”

“Tents on big sleds, like catamarans. They put up sails when the wind is right and move around.”

“Like iceboats?”

“Yes, like that I guess, but they’re like big rafts, and there’s a little camp’s worth of them, moving around together.”

“Wow, that sounds interesting.”

“Yeah, they’re like Huck Finn on the ice cap.”

“So—but it’s going well when you see her.”

“Oh yeah. Sure. I can’t wait.”

“And the, the other guy?”

“I like X. We get along well. I mean, we’re friends. We don’t talk about Val, that’s understood. But other than that we’re like any other friends. We understand each other. We don’t talk about it, but we understand.”

“Interesting!” Frank said, frowning. “It’s—kind of hard to imagine.”

“I don’t even try. That’s part of how it works.”

“I see.” Though he didn’t.

“You know how it is,” Wade said. “When you’re in love, you take what you can get.”

“Ahhh.”

His plane landed at JFK in the midmorning, and after that Frank had scheduled in a layover of several hours before his commuter pop down to D.C. The plan had puzzled the woman in the White House travel office, but he had only said, “I have some business in New York that day.”

Now he got in a taxi and gave the driver the address of a YMCA in Brooklyn. He sat back in the back seat and watched the infinite city flow by outside the window. It went on and on. Frank felt dumbstruck with jetlag, but as the taxi driver pulled up to the curb, next to yet another block-long five-story building, he was also curiously tense.

The chess tournament was taking place in a gym that had room for only one basketball court and a single riser of stands. Stale old-locker smell. There was a pretty good crowd in the stands.

Frank climbed the metal stairs to the top riser and sat down behind a couple of guys wearing Yankees caps. For some reason he didn’t want to be seen. He only wanted to see—

Down there at one of the tables, Chessman was playing a girl. Frank shuddered with surprise, startled by the sight even though he had been (mostly) expecting it. Clifford Archer, the tournament website had said, under-sixteen level, etc. It had seemed like it had to be him.

And there he was. He looked a bit older and taller, and was wearing a checked shirt with a button-down collar. Frank felt himself grinning; the youth held the same hunched position over this game that he had had at the picnic tables.

Maybe he had moved up here with family, as Deirdre had guessed. Or was doing it on his own somehow, following his chess destiny.

Every game in progress was represented as a schematic on a screen set up at the far end of the room, and after Frank identified Chessman’s game he could follow its progress move by move. In his jetlagged state and his low level of expertise he found it hard to judge how the game was going; they were in an odd configuration, somewhere in the mid-game, Chessman playing black and seeming to be pushed to the edges a bit more than was usual for him, or safe.

Frank studied the game, trying to get what Chessman was up to. It reminded him sharply of the long winter, when he had first met the bros, and built his treehouse. He hadn’t cared then what happened in the games. Now he was rooting for Chessman, but in ignorance. The two players had both lost about the same number and strength of pieces.

Then the girl took one of Chessman’s bishops, but it was a sacrifice (Frank hadn’t seen it) and after that Chessman’s trap was revealed. He had her in a pincer movement of sorts, although she had a lot of pieces in the middle.

The men sitting on the riser just below him were murmuring about this, it seemed. Frank leaned forward and said in a low voice, with a gesture:

“Is that young man doing well?”

They both nodded, without looking back at him. One muttered from the side of his mouth, “He’s very patient.”

The other one nodded. “He plays black even when he’s playing white. He’s like good at waiting. He’s going to win this one, and she’s a junior master.”

And though Frank couldn’t see it, they were right. Chessman made a move, hit his timer and leaned back. The girl scowled and resigned, shook hands with Clifford, smiling crookedly, and went to rejoin her coach for a postmortem.

Chessman stood. No one joined him, and he was not looking around. He walked over to the officials’ table, and some of the people standing there congratulated him. Frank stood, walked down the stairs to the floor of the gym, crossed the court, and approached the officials’ table. He paused when he saw the youth in conversation with someone there, talking chess, it was clear. Chessman was animated, even cheerful. There was a look on his face that Frank had never seen before. Frank stopped in his tracks. He hesitated, watching. Finally he turned and left the gym.

-

THE NEXT DAY FRANK RAN WITH EDGARDO, and told him about his trip, and then said to him, “You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said about Caroline, and I’ve tried contacting her by getting into her surveillance, and it hasn’t worked, and I’m getting scared. And it occurred to me that maybe your friends might be in some sort of contact with her, if what you said happened to be the case, and if so, that they might be able to tell her that I really, really want to see her. I need to see her, if it’s at all possible. Because otherwise it’s just too…well. I’m scared is the thing.”

“Yes, yes yes yes yes,” Edgardo said, as if pooh-poohing the idea; and then he went silent, as if thinking it over; and then he made no other response at all, but as they made the turn under the Lincoln Memorial, changed the subject to the difficulties that Chase was having with Congress.

The following Wednesday after dinner, Frank went to the mouth of Rock Creek to check the dead drop, and there was a new note.

In just a couple of hours, if she meant tonight! Thank God he had thought to check! Thank God and thank Edgardo. Frank ran to his VW van, which he had parked in the boathouse parking lot, and drove north on Wisconsin at speed, in a state of high excitement. In Bethesda he took a right and parked in a dark spot near the little park they had first met in. He got out, walked to the bench under the little statue of the girl holding up the hoop. The empty cipher, there in the dark; he waited; and suddenly there she was, standing before him.

They banged together and hugged. “Where have you been?” Frank said roughly, face in her hair. “I’ve been so scared.”

She shook her head for him to be silent, ran a wand over him. “I heard,” she said at last, hugging him again. “I’ve had to be away. But I’ve been in contact with your friend’s friends, and they told me you were concerned.”

“Ah. Good old Edgardo.”

“Yes. But you need to understand, I have to stay clear of any possibility of them finding me. And a lot of the time you’ve been chipped.”

“I’m trying to stay completely clean when I’m not at work. I got rid of my van and got a new one, an old one I mean, and it’s clean too.”

“Did you come here in it?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go check it out.”

He led her to it, holding her hand. At the van she said, “Ah, cute,” and checked it with her wand and another device from her fanny pack. “It’s all clear.” And then they kissed, and then they were climbing inside the van, kissing their way to the little mattress up in the back.

Once again everything else fell away, and he was lost in the little world they made together, completely inside the wave. There was no sexier space than the little overhead mattress of a VW van. And something about it, some quality—the presence of ordinary sheets and pillows, the fact that she had come out of hiding to reassure him, their complete nakedness, which had never before been true—the comfort and warmth of this little nook—even the fact that Diane was with Phil now and Frank entirely committed, no confusion, mind clear, all there, all one, undamaged and whole—the look in her eye—all these things made it the sweetest time yet. The calmest and deepest and most in love.

Afterward she fell asleep in his arms. For an hour or two he lay there holding her, breathing with her. Then she stirred and roused herself. “Wow, that was nice. I needed that.”

“Me too.”

“I should go,” she said. She rolled over onto him, pushed his numb nose with a finger. “I’m going to be out of touch again. I’ve still got some things I’ve got to do. Your Edgardo’s friends are looking like they will turn out to be a help when the time comes, so look to word from him.”

“Okay, I will.”

“There’ll come a time pretty soon when we should be able to act on this. Meanwhile you have to be patient.”

“Okay, I will.”

She rolled off him, rooted around for her clothes. In the dark he watched her move. She hooked her feet through her underwear and lay on her back and lifted up her butt to pull them up and on, a nifty maneuver that made him ache with lust. He tugged at the underwear as if to pull it back down but she batted his hand away, and continued to dress as if dressing in tents or VW vans or other spaces with low headroom was a skill she had had occasion to hone somewhere. It was sexy. Then they were kissing again, but she was distracted. And then with a final kiss and promise, she was off.

-

ONE AFTERNOON AT WORK, just before she left, Anna Quibler got an e-mail from her Chinese contact, Fengzhen. It was a long one, and she made a quick decision to read it on her laptop on the Metro ride home.

As she read, she wished she had stayed in the office so she could make an instant reply. The letter was from Fengzhen, but he made it clear he was speaking for a group in the Chinese Academy of Sciences that wasn’t able to get word out officially, as their work had been declared sensitive by the government and was now fully classified, not to say eliminated. The group wanted Anna and the NSF to know that the ongoing drought in western China had started what they called an ecological chain reaction at the headwaters of the Yangtze and the Yellow Rivers; the “general systems crash” that Fengzhen had mentioned in his last e-mail was very close to beginning. All the indicator species in the affected areas were extinct, and dead zones were appearing in the upper reaches of several watersheds. Fengzhen mentioned maps, but the e-mail had not had any attachments. He referenced her previous question, and said that as far as the group could tell, clean coal plants, a greatly reduced pesticide load, and a re-engineered waterway system, were three things that must be done immediately. But as he had said before, it was a matter of cumulative impacts, and everything was implicated. The coming spring might not come. His study group, he went on, wanted to go beyond the diagnostic level and make an appeal for help. Could the U.S. National Science Foundation offer any aid, or any suggestions, in this emergency?

“Shit,” Anna said, and shut down her laptop.

In Bethesda, she made sure Nick was okay and then walked on to the grocery store to see if there were any vegetables left from the day’s farmers’ market, thinking furiously. In the grocery store’s parking lot she called Diane Chang’s number at work. No answer. Then her cell-phone number. No answer there either. Maybe she was hanging with the president. Anna left a message: “Diane, this is Anna Quibler. I need to talk to you at your soonest convenience about reports I’m getting from a contact in the Chinese Academy of Sciences concerning environmental problems they’re seeing there. I think we need to make some kind of response to this, so let’s talk about it as soon as we can, thanks, bye.”

She had just gotten home from the grocery store with the fixings for goulash (paprika was good at masking the taste of slightly elderly veggies), and was boiling water and badgering Nick to get to his homework, when Charlie and Joe burst in the door shouting their greetings, and at the same moment the power went out.

“Ah shit!”

“Mom!”

“I mean shoot, of course. Dang it!”

“Karmapa!”

“Heavens to Betsy. I can’t make dinner without power!”

“And I can’t do my homework,” Nick said cheerfully.

“Yes you can.”

“I can’t, the assignment is online!”

“You’ve got a syllabus page in your notebook.”

“Yeah but tonight was added on, it’s only online.”

“You can do the next thing on the syllabus.”

“Ah Mom!”

“Don’t Ah Mom me! I’m trying to find the candles here, Charlie can you help get them out?”

“Sure. Wow, these feel funny.”

“I hope they aren’t all—yep, they are. Melted like the Wicked Witch of the West. Dang it. Why—”

“Did you find matches there too?”

Charlie shuffled into the dark kitchen and gave her a hug from the side. Joe suddenly limpeted onto her legs, moaning “Momma Momma Momma.”

“Hi guys,” she said resignedly. “Help and get some candles lit. Some of these should work. Come on you guys, we’re in the dark here.”

They got some misshapen candles lit and placed them in the living room and the kitchen, and on the dining room table in between. Anna cooked spaghetti on their Coleman stove, heating a jar of sauce, and Charlie got a fire going in the fireplace. They settled in to eat. Nick ran down the batteries in his Gameboy, then read by the light of two candles. Charlie typed on his laptop and Anna did the same. The laptop screens were like directional lanterns, adding blue light to the candles’ yellow light. They ate yogurt and ice cream for dessert. Anna tried to restrict how many times they opened the refrigerator door, but it didn’t really work. She had the thermometers set up in the two boxes, and took a reading sometimes when people wanted to get food.

It was quiet outside, compared to the normal city hum. It had been a while since the last blackout, and it was comforting to fall into the routine. A sign that winter had come. Although there had been a spate of blackouts in the hottest part of the summer as well. Sirens in the distance. The clouds out the window were dark—no moon, apparently, and no city light coming from below. It would have been interesting to know how extensive the blackout was, and what had caused it, and how long it was expected to last. “Should we turn on the radio?”

“No.”

They would wait on the generator too. Crank it if they had to.

After a while they got out the Apples to Apples game, and played a few rounds. Joe joined them in the game while continuing to draw with Anna on a big sheet of poster paper they had spread on the floor. He had recently taken to drawing in a big way, mostly sketching big stick figures of various creatures, often red creatures with a kind of Precambrian look, flying over stick forests of blue or green. Now he continued to add lines, and scribbled in patches, while insisting on being part of the game, so that they dealt him a hand, and Anna helped him to read what his cards said, whispering in his ear to his evident delight. The game—junior level, for Joe’s sake—dealt people hands of cards on which were printed various nouns, and then an adjective card was turned up by the player whose turn it was, and the rest provided nouns face down, and that player shuffled them and read them aloud, modified by the common adjective, and picked which combination he or she liked the best. The adjective now was SLIMY; the nouns read aloud by Nick were SLIMY ANTS, SLIMY MARSHMALLOWS, and SLIMY PIPPI LONGSTOCKING. You picked nouns tailored to that particular judge, or else just gave up and tried to be funny. It was a good game, and although Joe was somewhat out of his depth and would not admit it, his choice of nouns often had a Dada quality that seemed inspired, and he won about as frequently as any of them.

On this night he was into it. He got a hand he didn’t like for some reason, and threw the cards down and said “These are bad! I poop on these cards!”

“Joe.”

“I gotta win!”

“It doesn’t matter who wins,” Charlie said as always.

“Why do we keep the adjectives we win then?” Nick would always ask.

“We do that because they describe us so well when we read them aloud at the end,” Charlie would always respond. This was his addition to the game, as for instance, at the end of this one: “I’m noisy, soft, happy, strange, slimy, and old!” he read. “Pretty accurate, as usual.”

Nick said “I’m weird, wonderful, useful, skinny, slippery, and sloppy.”

Anna was good, hard, spooky, sharp, and important. Ever since she had won the cards for dirty and fat she had been unenthusiastic about Charlie’s addition to the game.

Joe was great, short, smooth, fancy, jolly, strong, creepy, and loud. He had won the most.

“What does it mean when an illiterate person wins a game that’s written down?” Charlie wondered.

“Be nice,” Anna said.

After that they sat and watched the fire. The rumble of other people’s generators sounded almost like traffic on Wisconsin. The chill air outside the front door smelled to Charlie of two-stroke engines, and fires in fireplaces. The smell of last winter. Sirens still wafted in from the city distance.

Inside they huddled by the fire. It had been well below freezing for the last week, probably the cause of the blackout, and it was going to be very cold upstairs, with the wind rattling the windows. And in the morning the fire would be out. After some discussion they decided to sleep in the living room again. The couches would do fine for Nick and Joe, and Anna and Charlie hauled the tigers’ mattress up the stairs from the cellar. All this was a ritual now; sometimes they did it without the excuse of a blackout.

Faces ruddy in the flickering firelight. It reminded Charlie of camping out, although they never got to have fires in the Sierra anymore. Anna read “Good-night Moon” to Joe yet one more time (on nights like this he demanded old favorites), while Nick and Charlie read books silently to themselves. This put all four of them out pretty quickly.

The next morning they saw that a little snow had fallen. They were just settling in for the day, Charlie planning to roast some green firewood over the flames of drier wood, when the power came back on with its characteristic click and hum. It had been eleven hours. On the news they found out that electricity for essential services had been provided to Baltimore by the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, and that this had helped the power company to get back online faster.

The day was already disarranged, so Charlie took Nick to school, then returned home, where he and Anna and Joe tried to settle in. None of them seemed to be enjoying this situation, Anna and Charlie trying to work in quick shifts while the other occupied Joe, who was curious to know why he wasn’t at daycare; and after a couple hours’ struggle, Charlie suggested he take Joe out for a walk while Anna continued to work.

It was a crisp, clear day. According to the little backpacking thermometer hanging from the bottom of the baby backpack (Anna’s idea, more data) the temperature outside was very near zero. It would have been perfect conditions for the baby backpack, because with Joe on his back they kept each other warm. But Joe refused to get in it. “I wanna walk,” he said. “I’m too big for that now, Dad.”

This was not literally true. “Well, but we could keep each other warm,” he said.

“No.”

“Okay then.”

It occurred to Charlie that it had been quite a while since Joe had been willing to get in the thing and take a ride. And it was looking a little small. Possibly Joe had gotten into it for the last time, and the final usage of it had passed without Charlie noticing. With a pang Charlie put it into the depths of the vestibule closet. How he had loved carrying Nick and then Joe around like that. He had done a lot of backpacking in his life, but no load on his back had ever felt so good to him as his boys. Instead of weighing him down they had lifted him up. Now that was over.

Oh well. They set out together on a walk through the hilly neighborhoods east of Wisconsin Avenue.

-

ON A BRIGHT CHILL SATURDAY MORNING not long after that, Charlie once again joined Drepung and Frank down on the Potomac, this time at a put-in just downstream from Great Falls, on the Maryland side.

Mornings on the river were filled with a blue glassy light unusual elsewhere in the city at that time of year. The deciduous trees were bare, the evergreens dusted with snow.

Frank generally paddled ahead of the other two, silent as he so often was, absorbed in the scene. Charlie and Drepung followed at a distance, talking over the events of the week and sharing their news.

“Did Frank tell you that he visited the original Shambhala?” Drepung asked Charlie.

“No, what do you mean?”

Drepung explained.

“It seems a funny place for Shambhala to have begun,” Charlie said. “Out there in the middle of nowhere.”

“Yes, doesn’t it? But in the eighth century it was different, and, well, howsoever it came about, that’s where it happened.”

“But eventually it ended up in Khembalung.”

“Yes. That is simply the Sherpa word for Shambhala. It came into use when the city was in a hidden valley east of Everest.”

“But then the Chinese came.”

“Yes. Then the inhabitants moved to the island.”

“Now under the Bay of Bengal.”

“Yes.”

“And so what becomes of Khembalung now?”

Drepung smiled and waggled his paddles. “Always here and now, right? Or at the farm in Maryland, in any case.”

“Okay, if you say so. And what about this original site, is it going to be drowned too, you said? Won’t that make three for three?”

“No, Frank said it will be close to the shore of the new lake, but they are going to build a dike that will keep it dry.”

“Another dike?”

Drepung laughed. “Yes, it does sound a bit too familiar, but I’ve looked at the maps and heard the plans, and it sounds as if the dike will be rather huge, and more than enough to serve the purpose.”

“Why are the Chinese doing this?”

“I think they see it as a tourist attraction, basically. They are going to excavate the ancient city thoroughly, and clean it up for visitors, and call it Shangri-La, and hope that many tourists will come to see it. Then also, maybe go boating or swimming when the sea is filled.”

“Amazing.”

“Yes, isn’t it? But a good thing too. Shambhala is the Buddhist idea of utopia. So, the more this idea is alive in the world, the more people will think about why they are not living in some version of such a place. It stands for a different way of life.”

“Yes.”

“Also, in the political sense, it seems to me that it’s a little bit of a Chinese concession to the Dalai Lama. It’s part of their campaign to reconcile with the Dalai Lama.”

Charlie was surprised. “You think there is such a campaign?”

“Yes, I think they want it to happen. Even if it is only to serve their own purposes, they seem to be serious about it.”

“I’m surprised to hear you say that. Are you sure?”

Drepung nodded. “I’ve been made aware of informal talks with the Chinese.”

For a while they paddled hard to catch up with Frank, who was crossing to the Virginia side to look into the gap between Arlington and Theodore Roosevelt Island. Charlie watched Drepung paddle ahead of him, looking smooth and effortless.

“Drepung? Hey, can you tell me what’s going on with Joe and what we talked about?”

“Oh yes. I meant to tell you. Sucandra says that he and Qang can serve as the voice of Milarepa. Qang has done a divination to locate the spirit we exiled from Joe, and she says it is ready to come back. It was not happy to be expelled.”

Charlie laughed at that; it sounded like Joe. What if his spirit came back even angrier than before? But he forged on: “Qang…?”

“Yes, she is the servant of Tara, and has taken on much of the work of Rudra Cakrin, now that he is gone on.”

“And so—do you know when this can happen?”

“Yes.” Drepung glanced over at him. “We are having the ceremony that marks the recognition of the Maryland farm as the current manifestation of Shambhala, next Saturday.”

“Oh yeah, we got your invitation in the mail, thanks. I thought it said it was a housewarming.”

“Same thing. So, if you could come early, in the morning, we could have these private ceremonies. Then the afternoon could be devoted to celebrating all these things.”

“Okay,” Charlie said, swallowing hard. “Let’s do it.”

“You are sure?”

“Yes. I want Joe back. The original Joe.”

“Of course. Original mind! We all want that.” Drepung smiled cheerfully and called, “Hey Frank!” And dug his paddle tips in, to catch Frank before he disappeared around the tip of Roosevelt Island.

So that Saturday the Quiblers dressed up again, which was unusual enough to put them all in a fun mood, as if they were preparing for a costume party, or even Halloween: the boys and Charlie in shirts with collars, Anna in a dress: amazing!

Charlie drove them out the Canal Road to the Khembali farm, concocting the need for some meeting with Drepung to get them out there early. It was not far from the truth, and Anna did not question it.

So they arrived around ten, to find the farm compound decorated with great swatches of cloth dyed in the vivid Tibetan hues, draped over and between all the buildings, and weaving together on tall poles to form a big awning or tent on the lawn sloping down to the riverside.

Joe said, “Momma! Dad! It’s a color house! It’s a sky fort! Look!” He took off in the direction of the tent.

“Good!” Charlie said. “Be careful!”

“Will you go with him and watch?” Anna asked. “I want to see what Sucandra and Qang did with the kitchen remodel.”

“Sure, go check it out. I think I see them down in the tent right now, actually. But I’ll tell them that you’re checking it out and they’ll be on up I’m sure.”

“Thanks.”

Off she went inside. Charlie stood by Nick, who was looking at the party preparations, still ongoing. Nick said, “I wish Frank still lived here.”

“Me too. But I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”

“Do you think I can go up in the treehouse anyway?”

“Sure, sure. No one will mind. Go check it out. Don’t fall out.”

“Dad, please.”

“Well. Be careful.”

Off went Nick. It was all working out very well.

Charlie walked down to the big suspended awning, his heart pounding with trepidation.

Joe was standing in the middle of a circle of elderly Khembalis, looking around curiously. Sucandra was the youngest one there; Qang was chanting, her voice lower than most men’s. Joe nodded as if keeping time to her chant. White smoke billowed out of giant censers and bowls set around a low candle-covered table, on which stood a big statue of the Adamantine Buddha, the stern one with his hand outstretched like a traffic cop.

The candle flames danced on some breeze that Charlie could not feel. An old man on the opposite side of the circle from Qang shouted something. Joe, however, did not seem to notice the shout. He was staring at Qang and the others around her with the same absorption he displayed when watching one of his favorite truck videos. He raised a hand, and seemed to conduct Qang in her singing. She stared fiercely at him, cross-eyed and looking a bit mad. Charlie wondered if she were possessed by the spirit in question.

Finally she took some saffron powder from a bowl held before her by the man on her right, and held it out for Joe’s inspection. He put his finger in it, regarded the tip of his finger, sniffed it. Qang barked something and he looked up at her, held his hand out toward her. She nodded formally, theatrically, and took up a bowl of flower petals from the woman on the other side of her. She held the bowl out to Joe, and he took a fistful of pink flower petals, staining them saffron with his finger. The circle of elderly Khembalis joined the chanting, and began shuffling in a clump-footed dance around Joe, punctuating their chant with rhythmic short exclamations, somewhat like the “HAs!” that Rudra had shouted in Joe’s face the previous year. Some of them smacked their hand cymbals together, then held the vibrating little disks over their heads. Joe began a little two-step, hands clasped behind his back, reminding Charlie of the dance of the Munchkins welcoming Dorothy to Oz. Then as the chanting rose to a peak, Qang stepped forward and put her hand on Joe’s head. He stilled under it. The woman beside Qang put the rest of the flower petals on the back of Qang’s hand, and Qang flicked them into the air when she moved her hand away.

Joe sat down on his butt as if his hamstrings had been cut. Charlie rushed to his side, cutting through the dancers.

“Joe! Joe, are you okay?”

Joe looked up at him. His eyes were round, they bugged out like the eyes of the demon masks up at the farmhouse. Wordlessly he struggled to his feet, ignoring Charlie’s outstretched hand offering help. He took a swipe at Charlie:

“No, Da! Do it MY SELF. Wanna GO OUT! Wanna go!”

“Okay!” Charlie exclaimed. Instantly he worried that Anna would be concerned by this linguistic regression. But it happened sometimes to young kids, and surely it wouldn’t last for long. “Hey there, Joe. Good to see you buddy. Let’s go outside and play.”

He glanced up at Qang, who nodded briefly at him before she returned her gaze to Joe. She seemed herself again.

“Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Come! ON!”

“Okay sure! Let’s go! Let’s see if we can find Nick up in the treehouse, shall we? Treehouse? What do you say?”

“Treehouse? Good!” And his face scrunched into a climber’s scowl before he marched out the tent door, like Popeye on a mission.

“Okay!” Charlie looked at Qang. “I better go catch up. Hey Joe! Wait a second!”

When Anna came out from the Khembali farmhouse, where she had been conferring with Padma about the re-establishment of the Khembali Institute for Higher Studies, and the possibility of transferring the Khembali/NSF collaborative funds to studying the Chesapeake Bay rather than the Bay of Bengal, she found all three of her boys up in the treehouse, running from one room to the next on a network of catwalks. One of the catwalks was as flexible as a bouncy bridge, and the three of them were busy finding the sweet spot that would cast Joe the highest when Charlie and Nick jumped. Anna could have told them from many previous ground observations that there would be two sweet spots, one each about halfway between the midpoint and the ends, but they seemed to have to rediscover that physical fact every time.

Charlie had gone exuberant, as he often did in these situations. He was getting to be more Joe’s age than Joe himself. Although it would have been hard to tell at that moment, given Joe’s helpless giggling, and his shrieks of delight at every sprung launching. He had always loved weightlessness. Even in his first weeks, when colic had so often left him wretched and inconsolable, if she had tossed him lightly up and then gently supported him on the way down, never quite releasing her hold on his body and head, he would goggle and go still, then rapt. At the time she had postulated that the weightlessness reminded him of being in the womb, in a swimmer’s world, before the outer world had inflicted colic and all its other trials on him. Now, watching him fly, she thought maybe it was still true.

Charlie, on the other hand, just liked playing. Anything would do. In the absence of anything else he would pitch pennies against a wall, or flick playing cards into a pan set across the floor. Wrestle with the boys, especially Joe. Make paper airplanes out of the newspaper. Throw rocks, preferably into water. They all liked that. Very likely during some part of this day she would find them down on the banks of the Potomac, grubbing for pebbles to throw in the stream.