Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [82]
Frank read and heard all kinds of things about modern surveillance, and whenever he asked Edgardo about it on their runs, when they would not be overheard, Edgardo would grin and nod and say “That’s right.” He said “That’s right” to everything, until Frank said “Are you saying you don’t really know what’s going on and neither does anyone else on Earth?”
“That’s right.”
It was an impossible situation. No amount of googling would clarify it, and indeed any very extensive hunt might catch someone’s attention and make his situation worse. Better to lay low. Better to investigate by talking only to people who might know, and wouldn’t tell anyone else, in places where they wouldn’t be overheard. Strange but true; the possibility of electronic surveillance was driving him back to the oldest technology of all, talking out in the open air.
He wondered if Yann knew he was under surveillance, or that he was the reason many people of his acquaintance were also. He was going to have to talk to Yann.
He had discussed with Diane his idea of headhunting Pierzinski, and she had liked it. Carbon sequestration was in large part a biological problem; the amount of carbon they wanted to shift was beyond any currently affordable and deployable industrial capacity. They needed to involve the bacterial world, if they could. Pierzinski had been working on an algorithm that Frank thought might give them a much finer ability to predict and manipulate genomes, and apparently Yann and Eleanor and Marta were having their best successes at the bacterial level.
So he should go to Atlanta and talk to Yann. Add that to his visit to Francesca and he might even tweak the futures market in a way that Caroline could notice and tell him about when she called. And he needed to get a sense of how Pierzinski’s algorithm was coming along, and what Yann might be thinking about how he wanted his work situation to be configured.
But talking to Yann meant he would have to see Marta again. She and Yann lived together, so it seemed that if he flew down to meet with Yann, Marta would have to be part of it one way or another. That might very well be awful. The last time he had seen her had been terrible. However, too bad; he still had to do it. It would end up worse if he went down there and tried to see Yann while avoiding her. That would backfire for sure, although it might not be possible to make her any more angry with him than she already was, so maybe it didn’t matter.
But a part of him wanted to see her again anyway. All these women he was thinking about—mainly Caroline, the thought of whom made his heart pulse, and also perhaps spread a certain feeling over thoughts of Diane and her clever calmness, or even Francesca, whom he didn’t want to think about at all—all these thoughts often led in the end back to Marta, a woman he had lived with for years, someone he really knew and had had a relationship with, even if it had imploded. She would still be mad at him. But he had to see her.
______
From Atlanta’s airport he took a shuttle to a hotel downtown. The area around Georgia Tech featured wide avenues running up and down waves of low hills, between huge glossy skyscrapers, copper and blue and dragonfly green. The school’s football stadium appeared below street level to his right as the shuttle inched along, reminding him with a brief pang of Khembalung.
After checking into the hotel Frank showered, then dressed with more care than usual. Uneasy glances in the mirror. Pierzinski had a little touch of Asperger’s, not uncommon in mathematicians; over the phone he had agreed to Frank’s request for a meeting with innocent delight, saying, “I’ll bring Marta along, she’ll love to see you.”
Frank had recalled his last encounter with Marta in San Diego, and held his tongue. It was enough to make him wonder just how close Yann and Marta were. Maybe she was not in the habit of talking to Yann about her past. Frank hoped not.
Anyway,