Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [92]
“Shadow candidate,” Diane corrected. “Like in Europe.”
“Or,” Anna said, “just put the platform out there, with a virtual candidate. Dr. Science. See which party picks it up.”
“Neither,” Frank and Diane said together.
“We don’t know that,” Anna said. “And it would be safer than endorsing one party over the other, or starting some kind of scientific third party that would only hurt politicians who are on our side. Either way we could get pushed out of policy for years to come. Cast into the wilderness.”
“We’re already there,” Frank pointed out.
“So what have we got to lose?”
“Well, that’s true enough.” Frank thought it over. “We could get hammered.”
“Like we aren’t already?”
“Hmmm.”
“Maybe we have to take a stand. Maybe that’s what it means to get involved in politics. You have to declare. You have to talk about what people should do.”
They sat there, thinking things over. Edgardo walked in and they explained to him what they were thinking.
He laughed hard.
Frank kept scribbling. “Social Science Experiment in Politics.”
“In elective politics,” Anna insisted, frowning at Edgardo. “Then it’s, what, SSEEP. Pronounced ‘Seep.’ Like we’re seeping into policy.”
“Seep!” Diane laughed. “We’ll seep in like a bull in a china shop! Seep in and the whole shop will start screaming.”
“Maybe so. But the china shop is going under. It needs a bull to, what, to pull the whole thing up to higher ground.”
They laughed at this image.
“Well,” Diane said, “we need to do everything we can. Sort all this out, Frank. Look into all of it.”
Frank nodded. “Bold and persistent experimentation! I have a list here.”
Diane waved a hand. “More later. I’m starving.”
“Sure. You want to go get a bite?”
“Sure.”
Anna quickly glanced down. They had just arranged a date, right in front of her eyes. And not the first one, from the sound of it.
She thought, what about Frank’s woman from the elevator? Had he given up on her? That didn’t seem like him. Anna was obscurely disappointed; she liked that story, that possibility. It had appealed to the romantic in her, which was buried but substantial. She had almost asked him about it at one of their lunches, but something in his manner had kept her from it. And as for Frank and Diane, well, she could not imagine what it meant. Surely she had misread the situation. Diane was nice, certainly; but even in the light of Anna’s own puritanical work ethic, she was a bit much. What would she be like socially? It was hard to imagine.
And she herself would never know what Diane was like socially. She was a woman, and married; while Frank was a man, and unmarried; and Diane was now unmarried too, poor thing. And Frank had been plucked out from among the visiting program directors by Diane, to run her climate project committee.
“I’ve got to get home,” she said, throwing her things together. Home to her boys, who would leap on her and say the same things, all deep in their own worlds, and the dinner only partly made. Although in the same flare of irritation she felt a deep relief and a desire to be there at once.
At home her boys did leap on her, as predictable as clockwork, and the house was warm with kitchen smells.
The flood had revolutionized their cooking habits, Charlie trying old recipes and new, based on whatever produce the grocery store had available. Tonight, Mexican. Joe commanded her attention, insisting on Goodnight, Moon again, read in an up-tempo declamatory singsong very unsuited to the book’s soporific nature, which worked like a charm on her no matter what, but not on him. He was fretful again, and sucked at her desperately, as if seeking a relief beyond food. She spoke in quiet tones to Nick, and he read as he replied, or didn’t, mostly off in his own world. She tried not to worry about Joe, although his distemper had now lasted six weeks. Every test had been taken. Nothing had been discovered, except that slightly elevated temperature, which the record showed was real, if ever so slight. Its periodicity reminded her of her own temperatures