Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [87]
“That’s very true.”
Her stare grew suspicious, then calculating. “You can’t possibly like Washington, D.C.”
“Well, I don’t know. I’m beginning to think it’s okay.”
“It’s the East Coast, Frank! Jesus, you’ve lost your perspective out here. It’s a swamp! No beach, no ocean—”
“There’s the Atlantic—”
“No waves, and it’s hours to get to there, even if there were.”
“I know.”
“Frank,” she said, looking at him with new interest. “You’ve gone crazy.”
“A little bit, yeah.”
“That’s why you apologized to me.”
“Well, I meant it. I should have said it before.”
“That’s true.”
“So maybe I’m getting less crazy.” He laughed, met her eye.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Ah well.”
She watched him, shrugged. “Time will tell.”
Again Frank understood that he had lost a relationship with someone he could have gotten along with. But now what had happened in the past had a kind of trajectory or inertia to it, that could not be altered; the relationship was wrecked for good. He caught a quick glimpse of a different life, he and Marta still together in San Diego. But the bad things that had happened could never be undone, and that whole world of possibility was gone, popped like a soap bubble.
What if humanity’s relationship to Earth was like that?
A nasty thought.
It occurred to him that he could warn Marta about the surveillance they were living under, Yann too. But as with Francesca, he found he wasn’t ready for that—for what he would have to get into to tell her about it. I have this spook girlfriend, we’re all under surveillance, we’re part of an experiment in which computer programs bet on us, and our stock may now be rising. No.
Instead he said, “So you would consider an offer to move your lab to a federal institute?”
“Maybe. I’ll talk to Yann. But it might really crimp any chance for big compensation for all this.”
“Well, but it won’t have much chance of happening at all if it stays in the private sector.”
“That’s what you say. I’ll talk to Yann about it. And Eleanor. We’ll come to a decision together.”
Frank nodded, yeah yeah yeah: point already taken, blade in to the hilt, no call to be twisting it.
Marta, eyeing him, relented. “Make it so it could get us back to San Diego. That might do it. I need to get back in the water.”
ANNA WAS CONVINCED THAT JOE HAD caught something in Khembalung, or on the long journey home. He had been more than usually fractious on all the return flights, and worse as they went on, from the confused tears in the helicopter to the exhausted screams on the final L.A.-to-Dulles leg. What with that and their own exhaustion, and the shock of the flood overwhelming Khembalung, they had reached the moment that sometimes happens in a bad trip, when everyone is thinking what a terrible idea it was to begin with and no one can think of anything to say, or even meet their fellow sufferers in the eye. Anna and Charlie had endured a few of these trips before, none quite so bad, but they both knew what the lack of eye contact meant and what the other one was thinking. Dispense with talk and do the necessary, in a kind of grim solidarity. Just get home.
But then, at home, Joe’s dis-ease had continued, and to Anna he felt a little hot. She got out the thermometer, ignoring Charlie’s heavy look and biting her tongue to avoid yet another ridiculous argument on this topic of medical data gathering. Though he would not usually admit to it, Charlie suffered from a kind of magical thinking that believed that taking a temperature might invite an illness to appear which did not exist until it was measured. Anna suspected this came from the Christian Scientists in Charlie’s family background, giving him a tendency to see illness as the taint of sin. This was, of course, crazy.
And Anna craved data, as usual. Taking a temperature was just a matter of getting more information. It always helped her to know things more precisely; the more she knew, the less her fears could imagine things worse than what she knew. So she took Joe’s temperature without consulting Charlie, and found it registered