Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [150]
“Oh cool. When are you going to meet with Phil about these pumps?”
“Diane will do it.”
“Okay good. Say hi to him, or have her say hi to him. It’s been a lot harder to get him on the phone since he got elected.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I keep telling him to come down here and see for himself, and he always says he will.”
“I’m sure he wants to.”
“Yeah he would love it.”
“So Wade, are you still seeing that woman down there?”
“It’s complicated. Are you still seeing that woman in D.C.?”
“It’s complicated.”
Satellite hiss, as they both were cast into thoughts of their own—then short and unhumorous laughs from both of them, and they signed off.
In San Diego, Frank rented a van and drove up to UCSD, checking in at the department to collect mail and meet with his remaining grad students. From there he walked up North Torrey Pines Road to RRCCES.
The labs were back, fully up and running, crowded, not messy but busy. A functioning lab was a beautiful thing to behold. A bit of a Fabergé egg; fragile, rococo, needing nurturance and protection. A bubble in a waterfall. Science in action. In these, they changed the world.
And now—
Yann came in and they got down to the latest. “You have to go to Russia,” Yann said.
“I am.”
“Oh! Well good. The Siberian forest is amazing. It’s so big that even the Soviets couldn’t cut it all down. We flew from Cheylabinsk to Omsh and it just went on and on and on.”
“And your lichen?”
“It’s way east of where we spread it. The uptake has been just amazing. It’s almost even scary.”
“Almost?”
Yann laughed defensively. “Yeah, well, given the problems I see you guys are having shifting away from carbon, a little carbon drawdown overshoot might not be such a bad thing, right?”
Frank shook his head. “Who knows? It’s a pretty big experiment.”
“Yeah it is. Well, you know, it’ll be like any other experimental series, in that sense. We’ll see what we get from this one and then try another one.”
“The stakes are awfully high.”
“Yeah true. Good planets are hard to find.” Yann shrugged. “But maybe the stakes have always been high, you know? Maybe we just didn’t know it before. Now we know it, and so maybe we’ll, I don’t know. Do them a little more…”
“Carefully? Like by putting in suicide genes or other negative feedback constraints? Or environmental safeguards?”
Yann shrugged, embarrassed. “Yeah sure.”
He changed the subject, with a look heavenward as if to indicate that what the Russians had done was beyond his control. “But look here, I’ve been working on those gene-expression algorithms some more, and I’ve seen a wrinkle in the palindrome calculation. I want you to take a look at it see what you think.”
“Sure,” Frank said.
They went into Yann’s office, a cubicle just like any other office cubicle, except that the window’s view was of the Pacific Ocean from three hundred feet above sea level. Yann clicked his mouse as rapidly as a video game player and brought up pages that worked like transparencies, one colored pattern after another, until it looked like the London tube map replicated a few times around a vertical axis. As he continued to click, this cat’s cradle rotated more on the axis, so that a really good false sense of three dimensions was established. He squished that image into the top of his huge screen and then on the bottom began to write out the equations for the middle steps of his algorithm. It was like working through a cipher set in which the solution to each step cast a wave of probabilities that then had to be explored and in some cases solved before the next step could be formulated; and then again like that, through iterations within sets, and decision-tree choices to determine the steps that properly followed. Algorithms, in short; or in long. They dug in, and Yann talked and drew on a whiteboard and clicked on the mouse, and typed like a madman, speed-talking all the while, free-associating as well as running a quick tutorial for Frank in his latest thinking, Frank squinting, frowning, asking questions, nodding, scribbling himself, asking more questions. Yann was now the