Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [186]
“I don’t know how you can say that!”
“That’s what our models show.”
“Any idea how fast the propagation will go?”
“It kind of depends on how we distribute it in the first place.”
“Jesus, Marta. So the Russians are just doing this?”
“Yes. The president thinks it’s too important to risk sharing the decision with the rest of the world. Democracy could hang up their best chance of a rescue, he apparently said. They now think that global warming is more of a disaster for them than for anyone else. At first they thought it might warm them up and make for better agriculture, but now their models are predicting drought, and cold more severe than ever, so they’re bummed.”
“Everyone’s bummed,” Frank said.
“Yeah but Russia is actually doing something about it. So quit trying to buy me off, Frank. We’re going to be doing fine on our own. We’ve got some performance components in our contract that look good.”
Villas are cheap in Odessa, Frank didn’t say.
“The new center hired Leo Mulhouse to run a bio lab,” he said instead.
“Ah ha! Well. That’s good.” She didn’t want to give him any credit. No matter what you do you’ll still be an asshole, her silence said. “Okay, well. He’ll be good. See you Frank.”
“Bye Marta.”
The moment he got off he called Diane, and had to leave a message, but right at the end of the day she called back. He told her what Marta had said, and she was just as surprised as Frank had been, he could tell. Part of him was pleased by this; it meant she had been deceived by Dmitri too, or at least, left in the dark. Not that she sounded like a woman betrayed, of course; indeed, she sounded as if she thought it might be a good development. “My God,” she said as they finished sharing what impressions they had of the situation, “things are getting complicated, aren’t they?”
“Yes they are.”
A couple days later she confirmed the news to Frank. She had talked to Dmitri, and he had said yes, they were distributing genetically engineered organisms to draw down quantities of carbon fast. It was only a pilot project and they did not expect the organisms to spread beyond Siberia. He wouldn’t say over how large of an area the GMOs had been distributed, but he did confirm that one of the lichens had been licensed from Small Delivery Systems.
“Damn it,” Frank said. “That’s Yann. We really need to get him onto our team somehow.”
Diane said, “I wonder if we can, now.”
“Well, I think he still wants to move back to San Diego. Not that he couldn’t on his own, but maybe the center at Torrey Pines will look good to him.”
“Depending on his contract, he may get very little from any work he’s done for Small Delivery. And he may not be in control of his research program.”
“True.”
“Let’s keep making the offer. Funding and freedom in San Diego—he may still go for it.”
MEANWHILE, IN THE MIDST OF ALL this, science itself proceeded in its usual manner; which is to say, very slowly.
Anna Quibler liked it that way. Take a problem, break it down into parts (analyze), quantify whatever parts you could, see if what you learned suggested anything about causes and effects; then see if this suggested anything about long-term plans, and tangible things to do. She did not believe in revolution of any kind, and only trusted the mass application of the scientific method to get any real-world results. “One step at a time,” she would say to her team in bioinformatics, or Nick’s math group at school, or the National Science Board; and she hoped that as long as chaos did not erupt worldwide, one step at a time would eventually get them to some tolerable state.
Of course there were all the hysterical operatics of “history” to distract people from this method