Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [140]
ONE DAY SPENCER CALLED FRANK on his FOG phone.
“Hey Frank, did you check out your Emerson for the day?”
Frank had everyone reading it now: Diane, Spencer, Robin; even Edgardo, who only rolled his eyes and questioned the intelligence of any optimist. “No,” he said now to Spencer.
“Well here, listen to it. ‘I remember well the foreign scholar who made a week of my youth happy by his visit. “The savages in the islands,” he said, “delight to play with the surf, coming in on the top of the rollers, then swimming out again, and repeat the delicious maneuver for hours.” Well, human life is made up of such transits.’—Did you hear that, Frank?”
“Yes.”
“Ralph Waldo Emerson, saying that life is like surfing? Is that great or what?”
“Yes, that’s pretty great. That’s our man.”
“Who was this guy? Do you think somebody’s making all these quotes up?”
“No, I think Emerson made them up.”
“It’s so perfect. He’s like your Dalai Lama.”
“That’s very true.”
“The Waldo Lama. He’s like the great shaman of the forest.”
“It’s true, he is. Although even more so his buddy Thoreau, when it comes to the actual forest.”
“Yeah that’s right. Your treehouse guru. The man in the box. They are teaching you, baby!”
“You’re teaching me.”
“Yes I am. Well okay then, bro, surf your way up here and we’ll tee off at around five.”
“Okay, I’ll try to be there.”
In all the wandering, work was his anchor, his norming function. The only thing that was the same every day. These days he put in his hours focusing on the many problems cropping up as they tried to convince all the relevant agencies and institutions to act on their various parts of the mission architecture. They were also obtaining UN and national approvals for the sea water relocation projects. Holland was taking the lead here, also England, and really most countries wanted the stabilization, so the will was there, but problems were endless. The war of the agencies had gone incandescent in certain zones, and was coming to a kind of climax of the moment, as resistance to Diane’s mission architecture and the Fix-it coordinating efforts flared up in the Treasury Department and Interior and Commerce, big agencies all.
The technical issues in powering a massive relocation of sea water were becoming more and more naked to them. They mostly involved matters of scale or sheer number. Floating platforms like giant rafts could be anchored next to a coastline, and they could move about, they did not have to have a fixed location. Pumps were straightforward, although they had never wanted pumps so large and powerful before. Pipelines could be adapted from the oil and gas industry, although they wanted much bigger pipes if they could power them. Power remained the biggest concern, but if the rafts held an array of solar panels big enough, then they could be autonomous units, floating wherever they wanted them. Pipelines in the northern hemisphere had to be run overland to the playas they wanted to fill. China and Morocco and Mauritania had been the first to agree to run prototype systems, and other countries in central Asia had jumped on board.
Down in Antarctica, they could set them anywhere around the big eastern half of the continent, and run heated pipelines up to the polar plateau, where several depressions would serve as catchment basins. Cold made things more complicated down there technologically, but politically it was infinitely easier. SCAR, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, had approved the idea of the project, and they were as close to a government as Antarctica had, as the Antarctic Treaty signatory nations never met, and never kept to the treaty’s rules whether they met or not. In many senses NSF was the true government of Antarctica, and the relevant people at NSF were good to go. They saw the need.