Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [188]
“Let’s fund them ourselves when we can’t find anyone else,” Diane suggested. “Let’s get a group together to start rating these projects and awarding grants.”
“And Frank would say that group should start writing requests for proposal.”
Diane nodded. “For sure.”
NSF was now disbursing money at a truly unprecedented rate. The ten-billion-a-year budget goal, only recently achieved, looked like pump-priming compared to what they were now passing out. Though Congress still would not fully fund the repair of the District of Columbia, the right people on the right committees had been scared enough by the flood to start funding whatever efforts seemed most likely to keep their own districts from suffering the same fate. Maybe it was just a matter of politicians wanting to look statesmanlike when the big moment arrived; maybe they were just reflecting what they were hearing from home; maybe the two parties were jockeying for favor in the upcoming election. Whatever the cause, NSF had a supplementary budget this fiscal year of almost twenty billion dollars, and if they could find good ways to spend other federal money, Congress tended to back them.
“They lived through this winter and they’ve seen the light,” Edgardo said.
Anna maintained that the economy could always have afforded to pay for public work like this—that it was not even a particularly large share of the total economy—but that for so many years they had lived within the premises of a war economy that they had forgotten how much humans produced. Now that it was being redirected a little, it was becoming clearer how much the war economy had drained off.
“Interesting,” Edgardo said, looking intently at her. She very seldom talked about politics. “I wonder if it will correlate with the carbon economy. I mean, that we blew the fossil-fuel surplus on wars, and lost the chance to use a one-time surplus to construct a utopian scientific society. So now we are past the overshoot, and doomed to struggle in extreme danger for some birth-defected smaller version of just-good-enoughness.”
“One step at a time,” Anna insisted. “By the year 2500 it should all look the same.”
She liked the way she could make Edgardo laugh. It was easy, in a way; you only had to say out loud the most horrible thing you could imagine and he would shout with laughter, tears springing to his eyes. And she had to admit there was something bracing about his attitude. He bubbled away like a fountain of acids—everything from vinegar to hydrochloric—and it made you laugh. Once you had said the worst, a certain sting was removed; the secret fear of it, perhaps, the superstition that if you said it aloud you made it more likely to come to pass, as with Charlie and disease. Maybe the reverse was true, and nothing you said out loud could thereafter come true, because of the Pauli exclusion principle or something like it. So now she exchanged dire prophecies with Edgardo freely, to defuse them and to make him laugh.
You needed a theory of black comedy to get through these days anyway, because there was little of any other kind around. Anna worked every minute of her hours at work, until her alarm went off and reminded her it was time to go home. Then she took the Metro home, thankful that it was running again, using that time stubbornly to continue processing jackets, as she used to before the Foundation had gone into crisis mode. Continuing the real work. At home she found that Charlie had been once again sucked into helping Phil Chase’s campaign, an inevitable process now that it was coming down to the wire and they were all doing everything they could; so that he had barely managed to watch Joe while talking on the phone, and had not remembered to go