Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [72]
“That’s just patination. It’s four hundred thousand years old, man. That’s old. Older than art and religion, like you said.”
“It is art and religion.”
“A fossilized frisbee.”
“Fossil killer frisbee.”
“Except it doesn’t look like that’s what it was.”
“Well, I’m sticking with it,” Spencer said. “It’s too good a theory to give up on just for the sake of some evidence.”
“Yahhh!”
“This is just anecdotal evidence anyway. Means nothing.”
Frisbee golf in the last hour of light, running through the flickering shadow and light. Working up a sweat, making shots magnificent or stupid. Living entirely in his frisbee mind, nothing else intruding. The blessed no-time of meditation. Sports could do that sometimes, and in that sense, it did become religion. Turning the moment into eternity.
His shelter was completely rain-proofed now, and given the frequent summer showers, this made for a wonderfully satisfying situation: his little room, opensided under its clear plastic canopy, was frequently walled by sheets of falling water, like a bead curtain perpetually falling. The rain pounded down with its plastic drumming noise, like the shower you hear in the morning when your partner gets up—a susurrus or patter, riding on the liquid roar of the forest and the clatter of the creek below. The air less humid than during those muggy days when the rain held off.
Often it rained just before dawn or just after. Charcoal turning gray in the dimness of a rainy day. Low clouds scudding or lowering overhead. Sometimes he would sleep again for another half hour. The night’s sleep would have been broken, no matter where he spent the night; something would bring him up, his heart racing for no reason, then the brain following: thinking about work, or Caroline, or Marta, the Khembalis, the homeless guys, the frisbee players, housing prices in north San Diego County—anything could spark it off, and then it was very difficult to fall back asleep. He would lie there, in van or tree house or very occasionally his office, aware that he needed more sleep but unable to drop back in.
Rain then would be a blessing, as the sound tended to knock him out. And rain in the morning gave him time to lie there and think about projects, experiments, animals, papers, money, women. Time to remember that many men his age, maybe most men his age, slept with a woman every night of their lives, to the point where they hardly even noticed it, except in their partner’s absence.
Better to think about work.
Or to look at the pattern leaves made against the sky, black against the velvet grays. Stiffly shift around, trying to wake up, until he was sitting on the edge of the platform, sleeping bag draped over him like a cape, feet swinging in air, to listen for the gibbons. Insomnia as a kind of a gift, then, from nature, or Gaia, or the animals and birds, or his unquiet unconscious. Of course one woke a little before dawn! How could you not? It was so beautiful. Sometimes he felt like he was sitting on the edge of some great thing that only he could see was about to happen. Some change like morning itself, but different.
Other days he woke and could only struggle to escape the knot his stomach had been tied into during the night. Then it took the gibbons to free him. If they were within earshot, and he heard them lift their voices, then all was immediately well within him, the knot untied. An aubade: all will be well, and all will be well, and all will be perfectly well. That was what they were singing, as translated by some nuns in medieval Europe. It was another gift. Sometimes he just listened, but usually he sang with them, if singing was the right word. He hooted, whooped, called; but really it was most like singing, even if the word he sang was always “ooooooooop,” and every ooop was a glissando, sliding up or down. Ooooooop! Ooooooop!
If they sounded like they were nearby, he would descend from his tree and try to spot them. He had to be quiet, and as invisible as possible. But this was true for all his stalking. Light steps, looking down at the