Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [136]
The United States Intelligence Community (a cooperative federation).
Out on his run with Edgardo the next day, he said, “Are there really as many intelligence agencies as they say there are?”
“No.” Pause for a beat. “There are more.”
“Shit.” Slowly, haltingly, Frank told him about the situation with Caroline and the dead drop. “She said she would use it. So I’m worried. I feel helpless.”
They ran on in silence from the Washington Monument to the Capitol, and then back to the Washington Monument again; an unprecedented span of silence in Frank’s experience of running with Edgardo. He waited curiously.
Finally Edgardo said, “You should consider that maybe she is out of town. That maybe she is involved in the effort to deal with these guys, and so has to stay away.”
“Ah.”
It was like taking a pressure off the brain.
Thoreau said, “I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have.”
Oooooooop! And the gibbon chorus at dawn? It represented joy. It was saying I’m alive. Bert still started it every morning he was out in the enclosure at dawn. May too was an enthusiast. Sleeping in his VW van parked on Linnean, he could start each day joining the chorus at the zoo. It was the best way possible to start the day.
“While the man that killed my lynx (and many others) thinks it came out of a menagerie, and the naturalists call it the Canada lynx, and at the White Mountains they call it the Siberian lynx—in each case forgetting, or ignoring, that it belongs here—I call it the Concord lynx.”
There were no lynxes in Massachusetts now.
But the Rock Creek hominid persisted. Oooop! One could follow Rock Creek from the Potomac all the way up to the zoo, with a few little detours. North of that came the beaver pond, and then Site 21. Back out to Connecticut, to an early dinner, pay with cash on the check, big tip, so easy; off again into the park.
There he ran into Spencer and Robert and Robin, as planned; hugs all around. They were an affectionate group. Sling the friz, running and hooting through the dim yellow world, quickly working up a sweat. The flight of startled deer, their eponymous tails. Stand around afterward, feeling the blood bump through the body.
The autumn colors in Rock Creek were not like those in New England, they were more muted, more various—not Norman Rockwell, but Cezanne—or, as Diane suggested when Frank put it that way to her, Vuillard.
Vuillard? he asked.
She took him on a lunch break back to the Mellon room at the National Gallery. Eating hot dogs sitting on the steps, and then going in to examine the subtle little mud-toned canvases of Vuillard. Wandering side by side, arms bumping, heads together. Was that tan or umber or what. Imagine his palette at the end of the day. Like something the cat threw up.
She too was affectionate. She took his arm to propel him along. “So how does your head feel today?” she would ask.
“About the same as yesterday.”
She squeezed his arm. “I don’t ask every day. Are you still feeling better?”
“I am. You know, Yann’s doing some amazing things out there in San Diego.” It probably sounded like a change of subject, but it wasn’t.
“Yeah, like what?”
“Well, I think they’ve worked out how to get their DNA modifications into human bodies. The insertion problem may have been solved, and if that happens, all kinds of things might follow. Gene therapies, you know.”
“Wow. Nice to think that something’s going right.”
“Indeed.”
“It would be ironic to think that just as we were inventing real health care we burned the planet down instead.”
He laughed.
“Don’t laugh or I’ll bleed on you,” she said dourly, quoting him from the time of his accident. She too had lost someone young, he remembered; her husband had died of cancer in what must have been his forties or