Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [19]
The chorus grew louder and more agitated as the sky lightened. When sunlight pierced the forest they all went crazy together.
Then he saw three of them in the trees, sitting on high branches. He saw their long arms and longer tails, their broad shoulders and skinny butts. One swung away on arms that were as long as its body, to land on a branch by another, accept a cuff, and hoot some more. Again their raucous noise buffeted Frank. When they finally quieted down, after an earsplitting climax, the green day was upon them.
SENATOR PHIL CHASE SAID, “YOU KNOW, it’s not a question of you being right and me being wrong.”
“Of course not,” Charlie Quibler replied.
Phil grinned. “We all agreed that global warming was real.”
“Yes, of course we did.”
“No!” Joe Quibler murmured as he drowsed on Charlie’s back.
Phil laughed to hear it. “You’ve got a lie detector there.”
“Going off all the time, in this company.”
“Ha ha. Looks like he’s waking up.”
Charlie glanced over his shoulder. “I better start walking.”
“I’ll join you. I can’t stand any more of this anyway.”
They were at the Vietnam Memorial, attending a ceremony to mark its reopening. Phil, a veteran who had served as an Army reporter in Saigon for a year, had said a few words; then the president had shown up, but only near the end, the feeling among his people being that this was one memorial that would be better left buried in the mud. After that Phil was forgotten by the press on hand, which did not surprise him; but Charlie could tell by the slight tightness at the corner of his mouth that the calculated back of the hand to Vietnam had irritated him.
In any case they were free to leave. Normally Phil would have been whisked by car up the Mall to his offices, but a cancellation had opened a half-hour slot in his schedule. “Let’s go say hi to Abe,” he muttered, and turned them west. Offering this gift of time to Charlie; it was as close to an apology as Charlie would ever get.
A month earlier, right before the flood, Charlie had helped craft a giant bill for Phil, designed to jumpstart a real engagement with the climate-change problem. Then, in the last phase of intense committee negotiations, Phil had dismantled the bill to get a small part of it passed, effectively destroying the rest. He had promised Charlie he wouldn’t, but he had; and had done so without warning Charlie.
At the time Charlie had been furious. Phil had shrugged him off. “I am only doing the necessary,” he said, in his version of an Indian accent. “I must first be doing the necessary.”
But Charlie did not believe it had been necessary. And it did not help that since the flood Phil had been widely hailed as a prophet on the climate issue. Phil had laughed at this little irony, had thanked Charlie, had ignored with aplomb all Charlie’s explicit and implied I-told-you-so’s. “It’s all really a compliment to you, Charles—to you and your unworkable brilliance.”
“Um hmm,” Charlie said. “Yeah right.”
He was enjoying the situation too much to invent his side of the banter. Two old colleagues, out for a walk to the Lincoln monument; it was the rarest thing in town.
Landscaping equipment dotted the newly restored bank of the Potomac, and the background buzz of the city was augmented by their noise. The violent diesel huffing and puffing might have startled some sleeping children awake, but it served as a lullaby to Joe Quibler; the noise of trucks shifting gears on Wisconsin was his usual soporific, and he loved all big grinding sounds. So now he snoozed happily on, head nestled into the back of Charlie’s neck as they approached the memorial, nudging Charlie as always into the genomic sublime.
This part of the Mall had been twenty feet under the rush of the Potomac during the flood, and being landfill to begin with it had not put up very much resistance to