Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [125]
“Okay, maybe you’re right. Although shit does happen.”
“Just look into the practicalities of gathering and moving that quantity of salt,” Diane said with her little smile. “It may be completely impossible, in which case no consequences will follow.”
At night the trees of the forest were bare black statues, fractal and huge. There were points from which one could see down great lengths of the gorge. The snow was still rather thin on the ground, drifted into banks against the flood windrows and then icing over, leaving uneven layers of slimy black leaves underfoot. The resulting black-and-white patchwork made the topography of the park almost impossible to read, a kind of Rorschach space in which the tossing branches of the canopy were the best way to stay oriented to the ravine’s forms. The wind hooted and roared like the air choir of the world, gibbons had nothing on the winter forest as far as vocalizations were concerned. Ooooooooooooooooo!
Bouncing patterns, shifting whether he walked or not, and yet somehow the brain made the picture cohere. But sometimes it didn’t, and briefly he would be in an abstract world, all pattern, shifting shifting—ah, that was the Military Road bridge—and then a sudden understanding of what he was seeing would snap back into place with its customary “YOU ARE HERE” function. It was remarkable just how much understanding one lost when the visual field went haywire like that—not just what one saw, but where one was, who one was; a glitch in which everything blanked for a moment, pure consciousness caught in a mystery—then bang, all the explanations falling back in at once, leaving only a faint memory of absence.
He was the paleolithic in the park. A recent article in The Journal of Sociobiology had reminded him of the man in the ice, a man who had died crossing a Tyrolean pass some five thousand years before. He had lain there frozen in a glacier until something, perhaps global warming, had caused him to emerge and be discovered, in 1991. All his personal possessions had been preserved along with his body, giving archeologists a unique look at the technology of his time. Reading the inventory of his possessions, Frank had noticed how many correlations there were between his own gear and the man in the ice’s. Probably both kits were pretty much what people had carried in the cold for the last fifty thousand years.
The Alpine man had worn a coat made of sewn furs, the stitching very fine, all similar in design and effect to the down jacket Frank was wearing at that very moment. The Alpine man had worn a fanny pack like Frank’s, filled with several small tools that added up to the equivalent of Frank’s Swiss Army knife. The Alpine man’s unfinished bow stave and copper-headed axe (a marvel) had no ready equivalent in Frank’s equipment, though the axe resembled the ice axe he kept in his tree house; and he had taken to carrying his Acheulian hand axe around with him, in his fanny pack or even sometimes in his hand, just for the pleasure of the heft of it. It might even do a little good, in terms of personal defense; there were more and more people in the park, including some little gangs that did not look good to Frank. Not to mention the jaguar.
The Alpine man had worn a backpack made of wood and fur, quite similar in design to Frank’s nylon backpack; inside it were stuff sacks. A birch bark container had been designed to carry live embers, and there was also a little stone bowl in which to place flammable stuff to light by striking flints; all that equivalent to Frank’s handy cigarette lighter. Frank also had a little Primus stove up in the tree house, a primitive-looking steel thing that roared like a blowtorch and was almost as hot. How the Alpine man would have loved that! In effect Frank had a little bottle of fire he could light anywhere. The technological sublime indeed, when he had a little pot of coffee or soup on the boil.
The Alpine