Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [133]
“The problem,” Zeno told Frank, “is that half these animals are already chipped, and we aren’t supposed to plunk them twice, but it’s so tempting once you’ve got one in your sights.”
“So you shoot anyway?”
“No, we start shooting each other!” Triumphant laughter at this. “It’s like those paintball wars. Andy must have ten chips in him by now.”
“That’s only ’cause he shot so many people first!”
“Now there are surveillance screens in this city where he is like twelve people in one spot.”
“He’s a jury!”
“So don’t you be trying to send us on no more secret spy missions,” Andy told Frank. “We’re all lit up like Christmas trees.”
“Protective coloration,” Frank suggested. “I should pass through you guys every night.”
“Don’t do that,” Zeno warned. “We take this opportunity to say no to Dr. No.”
“Yeah well, sorry about that guys, I meant to thank you and I know it was a long time ago now, but whenever I came out here you guys weren’t here, so I didn’t know.”
“We’ve been around,” Zeno said.
A silence stretched, and Frank sat on his old bench. “Why are you pissed off at FOG?” he asked Fedpage. “How exactly did you get bogarted by the evil Big Brother that is Friends of the National Zoo?”
“The Department of Parkland Security, you mean? Look, all I was saying was that we were doing regular national-park work on a volunteer basis, and that made us subject to federal liability, which means we have to sign their stipulated waivers or else the NPS would be left liable for any accidents, whereas with the waivers it would fall on Interior’s general personnel funds, which is where you would want it if you wanted any timely compensation! But what do I know?”
Zeno said, “So get on that, Blood. We want that fixed.”
“Okay. Well hey guys, I was just passing through on my way to meet the frisbees, I’m going to go join them. But it’s good to see you. I’ll drop on by again. I’m doing some sunset counts for FOG, and dawn patrols too, so I’ll be around. Are folks hanging here much now?”
No replies, as usual. The bros never much on discussing plans.
“Well, I’ll see you if I see you,” Frank said.
“I’ll join you for a FOG walk,” Fedpage said darkly. “You need to hear the whole story about them.”
That day’s sunset was now gilding the autumn forest’s dull yellows and browns. Leaves covered the surrounding hillsides to ankle depth everywhere they could see. Cutter gestured at the view with the can of beer in his hand: “Ain’t it pretty? All these leaves, and nobody’s gonna have to leaf-blow them away.”
Fedpage did join him on a dawn patrol one morning, massaging his face to wake up. The two of them wandered slowly up the ravine, peering through the trees, pinging animals they saw with their FOG RFID readers. Fedpage talked under his breath most of the time. Perhaps obsessive-compulsive, with huge systems in his mind which made better sense to him than he could convey to other people. He was not unlike Anna in this intense regard for systems, but did not have Anna’s ability to assign them their proper importance, to prioritize and see a path through a pattern, which was what made Anna so good at NSF. Without that component, or even radically lacking in it, Fedpage was living on the street and crying in his beer, always going on about lost battles over semihallucinated bureaucratic trivia. An excess of reason itself a form of madness, indeed.
You needed it all working. Otherwise things got strange. Indecisiveness was a kind of vertigo in time, a loss of balance in one’s sense of movement into the future. When you weren’t actually in the state it was hard to remember how it had felt. “Forever wells up the impulse of choosing. ” So it might seem, when all was well.
He and Fedpage came on an old man, comatose in his layby—blue-skinned, clearly in distress. The two of them kneeled over him, trying to determine if he was still alive, calling Nancy and 911 both,