Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [62]
Civil society, post-Civil War. A motley of argonauts, infused with Manifest Destiny and gold fever, also with Emerson and Thoreau, Lincoln and Twain, their own John Muir. They said to each other, Here at the end of the road it had better be different, or else world history has all come to naught.
So they did many things, good and bad. In the end it turned out the same as everywhere else, maybe a little more so.
But among the good things, encouraged by Lincoln, was the founding of a public university. Berkeley in 1867, the farm at Davis in 1905, the other campuses after that; in the 1960’s new ones sprang up like flowers in a field. The University of California. A power in this world.
An oceanographic institute near La Jolla wanted one of the new campuses of the sixties to be located nearby. Next door was a U.S. Marine Corps rifle training facility. The oceanographers asked the Marines for the land, and the Marines said yes. Donated land, just like Washington, D.C., but in this case a eucalyptus grove on a sea cliff, high over the Pacific.
The University of California, San Diego.
By then California had become a crossroads, east and west all met together, San Francisco the great city, Hollywood the dream machine. UCSD was the lucky child of all that, Athena leaping out of the tall forehead of the state. Prominent scientists came from everywhere to start it, caught by the siren song of a new start on a Mediterranean edge to the world.
They founded a school and helped to invent a technology: biotech, Athena’s gift to humankind. University as teacher and doctor too, owned by the people, no profit skimmed off. A public project in an ever-more-privatized world, tough and determined, benign in intent but very intent. What does it mean to give?
FRANK CONSIDERED adding a postscript to Yann Pierzinski’s Form Seven, suggesting that he pursue internal support at Torrey Pines Generique. Then he decided it would be better to work through Derek Gaspar. He could do it in person during the trip he was making to San Diego to prepare for his move back.
A week later he was off. On the first flight west he fell asleep watching a DVD. Transfer at Dallas, a good people-watching airport, then up into the air again, and back to sleep.
He woke when he felt the plane tilt down. They were still over Arizona, its huge baked landforms flowing by underneath. A part of Frank that had been asleep for much longer than the nap began to wake up too: he was returning to home ground. It was amazing the way things changed when you crossed to the dry side of the ten-inches-of-rain-a-year isobar. Frank put his forehead against the inner window of the plane, looked ahead to the next burnt range coming into view. Thought to himself, I’ll go surfing.
The pale umber of the Mojave gave way to Southern California’s big scrubby coastal mountains. West of those suburbia hove into view, spilling eastward on filled valleys and shaved hilltops: greater San Diego, bigger all the time. He could see bulldozers busy scraping platforms of flat soil for the newest neighborhood. Freeways glittering with their arterial flow.
Frank’s plane slowed and drifted down, past the last peaks and over the city proper. Downtown’s cluster of glassy skyscrapers came into view immediately to the left of the plane, seemingly at about the same height. Those buildings had been Frank’s workplace for a time when he was young, and he watched them as he would any old home. He knew exactly which buildings he had climbed; they were etched on his mind. That had been a good year. Disgusted with his advisor, he had taken a leave of absence from graduate school, and after a season of climbing in Yosemite and living at Camp Four, he had run out of money and decided to do something for a living that would require his physical skills and not his intellectual ones. A young person’s mistake, although at least he had not thought he could make his living as a professional climber. But the same skills were needed for the work of skyscraper window maintenance; not just window washing, which he had also