Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [136]
So that was nice; but Frank still had to call Marta. It was amazing how his pulse rose at the prospect. His lip throbbed with each heartbeat. Every other item on the list seemed suddenly more pressing. Nevertheless, he took a deep breath and punched the number, wondering briefly how much this would bump his stock in the futures market. Why, if only he could get some shares, he could do things to raise their value, and then sell! Maybe this was what was meant by the ownership society. Maybe this was capitalism; you owned stock in yourself, and then by your actions the price per share rose. Except that you didn’t own a majority share. You might not even own any shares, and have no way to buy in; as with Frank and the spooks’ virtual market.
But there were other markets.
Marta picked up, and Frank said, “Hi Marta it’s Frank,” all in a rush. Forging on through her cold greeting and lack of conversation, he asked her how it was going with the lichen project.
She told him that it was going pretty well. “Do you have a cold?”
“No.”
They had engineered one of their tree lichen’s algae to a much more efficient photosynthesis, and altered the fungus component of the lichen so that it exported its sugar to the tree faster than the original lichen had. This lichen had always taken hormonal control of its trees, so now the sugar production from photosynthesis was merely being packed into the lignin of the trees faster than before; meaning extra carbon, added to the trees’ trunk girth and root size. So far the alterations had been simple, Marta said, and the trees would live for centuries, and had millions of years’ experience in not getting eaten by bacteria. The sequestration would therefore last for the lifetime of the tree—not long on geological scales, but Diane had declared early on in this discussion that the length of sequestration time was not to be a heavily weighted factor in judging the various proposals; any port in a storm, as she put it.
“That all sounds great,” Frank said. “And which trees do these tree lichen live on?”
They were pretty much omniarboreal, Marta said. Indigenous to the great world-wrapping forest of the north sixties latitudes, crossing Europe, Siberia, Kamchatka, and Canada.
“I see,” Frank said.
“Yeah,” Marta replied, suddenly chilling. “So what’s up?”
“Well, I wanted to let you know that the new center is ongoing out in San Diego. You aren’t going to believe this, but they’re going to lease the old Torrey Pines Generique facility.”
“Ha! You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“Well. You ought to hire Leo Mulhouse too while you’re at it. He’d get a cell lab working better than anyone.”
“That’s a good idea, I’ll pass that along. I liked him.”
Frank described the input from UCSD, Scripps, Salk, the San Diego biotech council. Then he told her about the progress with NSF’s unsolicited grants program. “There’s already a Small Grants for Exploratory Research program that’s been underutilized, and Diane has upped the maximum award. So the possibility is there for grants without external review.”
He couldn’t say any more; indeed, even saying this much might be dangerous: surveillance, recorded phone line, conflict of interest, hostile inspector general . . . shit. He had to leave the rest unsaid, but the implications seemed pretty damned obvious. And headhunting was still legal, he assumed.
“Yeah it sounds good,” Marta said sullenly, clearly in no mood to be grateful, or to hope. “So what?”
Frank had to let it go. He didn’t say, You’re going to have to be part of a government to get permission to release a