Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [142]
Cumulative impacts, Anna thought with a sigh. That was one of the most complex and vexing subjects in her own world of biostatistics. And the Chinese problem was an exercise in macrobiostatistics. What Anna’s correspondent Fengzhen talked about in his e-mails was what he called a “general system crash,” and he spoke of indicator species already extinct, and other signs that such a crash might be in its early stages. It was a theory he was working on. He compared the Chinese river valleys’ situation to that of the coral reefs, which had all died in about five years.
Anna read this and swallowed hard. She wrote back asking if he and his colleagues could identify the worst two or three impacts they were seeing, their causes and possible mitigations, and clicked send with a sinking feeling. NSF had an international component wherein U.S. scientists teamed with foreign scientists on shared projects, and the infrastructure obtained for these grants remained for the use of the foreign teams when the grants were over. A good idea; but it didn’t look like it was going to be adequate for dealing with this one.
Early one Saturday morning, Charlie met Frank and Drepung on the Potomac, at the little dock by the boathouse at the mouth of Rock Creek, and they put their kayaks in the water just after dawn, the sun like an orange floating on the water. They stroked upstream on the Maryland side, looking into the trees to see if there were any animals still out. Then across the copper sheen to the Virginia side, to check out a strange concrete outfall there. “That’s where I used to bring Rudra Cakrin,” Frank said, pointing at the little overlook at Windy Run.
Then he stroked ahead, smooth and splashless. He was not much more talkative here than he had been in the Sierras, mostly looking around, paddling silently ahead.
On this morning, his habits suited Charlie’s purposes. Charlie slowed in Frank’s wake, and soon he and Drepung were a good distance behind, and working a little to keep up.
“Drepung?”
“Yes, Charlie?”
“I wanted to ask you something about Joe.”
“Yes?”
“Well…I’m wondering how you would characterize what’s going on in him now, after the…ceremony that you and Rudra conducted last year.”
Drepung’s brow furrowed over his sunglasses. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Well—some I don’t know, some sort of spirit was expelled?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Well,” Charlie said. He took a deep breath. “I want it to come back.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want my Joe back. I want whoever he was before the ceremony to come back. That’s the real Joe. I’ve come to realize that. I was wrong to ask you to do anything to him. Whatever he was before, that was him. You know?”
“I’m not sure. Are you saying that he’s changed?”
“Yes! Of course that’s what I’m saying! Because he has changed! And I didn’t realize…I didn’t know that it took all of him, even the parts that—that I don’t know, to make him what he is. I was being selfish, I guess, just because he was so much work. I rationalized that it wasn’t him and that it was making him unhappy, but it was him, and he wasn’t unhappy at all. It’s now that he seems kind of unhappy, actually. Or maybe just not himself. I mean he’s easier than before, but he doesn’t seem to be as interested in things. He doesn’t have the same spark. I mean…what was it that you drove out of him, anyway?”
Drepung stared at him for a few strokes of the paddle. Slowly he said, “People say that certain Bön spirits latch on to a person’s intrinsic nature, and are hard to dislodge with Buddhist ceremonies. The whole history of Buddhism coming to Tibet is one fight