Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [125]
The conversation wandered, and sometimes grew ribald. Dave was outlining an all-too-convincing biological basis for the so-called midlife crisis, and general confessions of inappropriate lust for young women were soon augmented by one or two individual case studies of close calls, at work or in the gym. Laughter in the dark, and some long silences too.
Voices by starlight. But it’s stupid. It’s just your genes making one last desperate scream when they can feel they’re falling apart. Programmed cell death. Apoptosis. They want you to have more kids to up their chance of being immortal, they don’t give a shit about you or your actual happiness or anything.
If you’re just fooling around, if you don’t mean to leave your wife and go with that person, then it’s like masturbating in someone else’s body.
Yuck! Jesus, yuck!
Hoots of horrified hilarity, echoing off the cliffs across the lake. That’s so gross I’ll never again be able to think about having an affair!
So I cured you. So now you’re old. Your genes have given up.
My genes will never give up.
The little stove pellet burned out. The hikers went quiet and were soon asleep, under the great slow wheel of the stars.
The next day they explored the Lakes Basin, looking into a tributary of it called the Dumbbell Basin, and dropping to the Y-shaped Triple Falls on Cartridge Creek, before turning back up toward the head of the basin proper. It was a beautiful day, the heart of the trip, just as it was the heart of the pluton, and that pluton the heart of the Sierra itself. No trails, no people, no views out of the range. They walked on the heart of the world.
On such days some kind of freedom descended on them. Mornings were cold and clear, spent lazing around their sleeping bags and breakfast coffee. They chatted casually, discussed the quality of their night’s sleep. They asked Charlie about what it was like to work for the president: Charlie gave them his little testimonial. “He’s a good guy,” he told them. “He’s not a normal guy, but he’s a good one. He’s still real. He has the gift of a happy temperament. He sees the funny side of things.” Frank listened to this closely, head cocked to one side.
Once they got packed up and started, they wandered apart, or in duos, catching up on the year’s news, on the wives and kids, the work and play, the world at large. Stopping frequently to marvel at the landscapes that constantly shifted in perspective around them. It was very dry, a lot of the fellfields and meadows were brown, but the lakes were still there and their borders were green as of old. The distant ridges; the towering thunderheads in the afternoons; the height of the sky itself; the thin cold air; the pace of the seconds, tocking at the back of the throat; all combined to create a sense of spaciousness unlike any they ever felt anywhere else. It was another world.
But this world kept intruding.
Their plan was to exit the basin by way of Cartridge Pass, which was south of Vennacher Col, on the same border ridge of the pluton. This pass had been the original route for the Muir Trail; the trail over it had been abandoned in 1934, after the CCC built the replacement trail over Mather Pass. Now the old trail was no longer on the maps, and Troy said the guidebooks described it as being gone. But he didn’t believe it, and in yet another of his archeological quests, he wanted to see if they could relocate any signs of it. “I think what happened was that when the USGS did the ground check for their maps in 1968, they tried to find the trail over on the other side, and it’s all forest and brush