Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [48]
Kenzo’s eyes were round. He met Frank’s gaze, waggled his eyebrows like Groucho. Pretty interesting stuff!
“We have to do something,” Diane declared, without glancing at Frank. He thought: she’s been convinced. I was at least part of that. “The Gulf Stream is an obvious place to look at remediation, but there are lots of other ideas for direct intervention, and they need to be evaluated and prioritized according to various criteria—cost, effectiveness, speed, all that.”
Edgardo grinned. “So—we are going to become global biosphere managers. We are going to terraform the Earth!”
“We already are,” Diane replied. “The problem is we don’t know how.”
LATER THAT DAY FRANK JOINED THE noon running group, going with Edgardo and Kenzo down to the gym to dress and join Bob and Clark, from the Antarctic program on the seventh floor. The group was sometimes larger than this, sometimes smaller. They ran various routes, usually on old rail beds now converted into bike and running trails all through the area. Their usual lunchtime special ran parallel to Route 66 east for a while, then back around the curve of the Potomac and west back to NSF.
They ran at talking speed, which for this group meant about an eight-minute mile pace. A lot of the talking came from Edgardo, riffing on one thing or another. He liked to make connections; he liked to question things. He didn’t believe in anything. Even the scientific method was to him a kind of ad hoc survival attempt, a not-very–successful concoction of emergency coping mechanisms. Which belief did not, however, keep him from working maniacally on every project thrown his way, nor from partying late almost every night at various Latin venues. He was from Buenos Aires originally, and this, he said, explained everything about him. “All of us porteños are the same.”
“There’s no one like you, Edgardo,” Bob pointed out.
“On the contrary. In Buenos Aires everyone is like me. How else could we survive? We’ve lived the end of the world ten times already. What to do after that? You just put Piazzolla on the box and dance on, my friend. You laugh like a fool.”
You certainly do, Frank didn’t say. Of course Edgardo also did mathematics with applications in quantum computing, cryptology, and bioalgorithms, the last of which was the only aspect of his work that Frank understood. It was clear to him that at DARPA Edgardo must have had his fingers in all kinds of pies, subjects that Frank was much more interested in now than he had ever been before.
Where it paralleled Route 66 the running path became a thin concrete walk immediately north of the freeway, between the cars and the soundwall, with only a chain-link fence separating them from the roaring traffic to their right. The horribleness of it always made Edgardo grin. At midday when they usually ran it was totally exposed to the sun, but there was nothing for it but to put your head down and sweat through the smog.
“You really should run with an umbrella hat on like I do.” Edgardo looked ridiculous with this tall contraption on his saturnine head, but he claimed it kept him cool.
“That’s what hair is for, right?”
“Male pattern baldness has taken that away as an option for me, as I am sure you have noticed.”
“Wouldn’t that make baldness maladaptive?”
“Maladaptive in more ways than heat control, my friend.”
“Did you read that book, Why We Run? Explains how everything about us comes from adaptations to running? Even hair staying on the tops of our heads?”
Edgardo made a rude noise. “Why We Run, Why We Love, Why We Reason, all these are the same, they are simply titles for the bestseller list.”
“Why We Run was good,” Frank objected. “It had stuff on the physiology of endurance. And it talked about how lots of native peoples ran animals down, over a matter of several days, even deer and antelope. The animals were faster, but the chase group would keep on pounding away until they wore the animals out.”
“Tortoise and hare.”
“I’m definitely a tortoise.”
“I’m going to write one called Why We Shit,” Edgardo declared. “I’ll go into all