Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [98]
An excess of reason wasn’t going to do it.
Genes, however, were very reasonable. They followed their directive, they reproduced. They were a living algorithm, creatures of four elements. Strings of binaries, codes of enormous length, codes that spoke bodies. It was a kind of reason that did that. Even a kind of monomania—an excess of reason, as the koan suggested. So that perhaps they were all mad, not just socially and individually, but genomically too. Molecular obsessive-compulsives. And then up from there, in stacked emergent insanities. Unless it was infused with some other quality that was not rational, some late emergent property like altruism, or compassion, or love—something that was not a code—then it was all for naught.
He felt sick. It could have just been the heat and humidity, the speed of his walking, something he ate, a bug that he had caught or that had bit him. It felt like all those, even though he suspected it was all starting in his mind, a kind of idea infection or moral fever. He needed to talk to someone.
But it had to be with someone he trusted. That made for a very short list. A very, very, very short list. In fact, my God, who exactly would be on that list, now he came to think of it?
Anna. Anna Quibler, his colleague. The passionate scientist. A rock, in fact. A rock in the tide. Who could you trust, after all? A good scientist. A scientist willing to take that best scientific attitude toward all of reality. Maybe that’s what the old lama had been talking about. If too much reason was a form of madness, then perhaps passionate reason was what was called for. Passionate scientist, compassionate scientist, could analysis alone parse out which was which there? It could be a religion, some kind of humanism or biocentrism, philabios, philocosmos. Or simply Buddhism. If he had understood the old man correctly.
Suddenly he remembered that Anna and Charlie were hosting a party, and Anna had invited him. To help celebrate the day’s lecture, ironically enough. The Khembalis would be there.
He walked, sweating, looking at street signs, figuring out where he was. Ah. Almost to Washington Boulevard. He could continue to the Clarendon Metro station. He did that, descended the Metro escalator into the ground. A weird action for a hominid to take—a religious experience. Following the shaman into the cave. We’ve never lost any of that.
He sat zoned in one of the train cars until the change of lines at Metro Center. The interior there looked weirder than ever, like a shopping mall in hell. A Red Line, Shady Grove train pulled in, and he got on and stood with the multitude. It was late in the day, he had wandered a long time. It was near the end of the rush hour.
The travelers at this hour were almost all professionally dressed. They were headed home, out to the prosperous parts of Northwest and Chevy Chase and Bethesda and Rockville and Gaithersburg. At each stop the train got emptier, until he could sit down on one of the garish orange seats.
Sitting there, he began to feel calmer. The coolness of the air, the sassy but soothing orange and pink, the people’s faces, all contributed to this feeling. Even the driver of the train contributed, with a stop in each station that was as smooth as any Frank had ever felt, a beautiful touch on the big brakes that most drivers could not help but jerk to one degree or another. This guy eased smoothly in, over and over, station after station. It was like a musical performance. The concrete caves changed their nameplates, otherwise each cave was almost the same.
Across from him sat a woman wearing a black skirt and white blouse. Hair short and curly, glasses, almost invisible touch of makeup. Bra strap showing at her collarbone. A professional of some sort,