Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [158]
Then it was on to London, by way of Moscow, which he did not see at all. In his London hotel after the flights, he was jetlagged into some insomniac limbo, and could not sleep. It felt strange to have such a big bed at his command, and a room—oppressive, even decadent.
He checked his e-mail and then the internet. His browser’s home page news had a little item about Phil Chase and Diane opening a National Academy of Sciences meeting together. He smiled ruefully, almost a grimace, and clicked to Emerson, where a search using the word traveling brought up this:
Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
From “Self-Reliance.” Frank laughed, then showered and went to bed, and in the midst of his giant’s weary buzzing, the luxury of lying horizontally suddenly took him away.
The conference he was attending was being held in Greenwich, near the Observatory, so that they could inspect in person, as an integral part of the conference, the Thames River Barrier. Witness the nature of the beast. The barrier was up permanently these days, forming a strangely attractive dam, composed of modular parts raised up from the river bottom, in a curve like a longbow. Ribbed arcs. One could walk out onto the first part of the broad concrete crescent, and from there it was very obvious to the eye that the seaward side, still a river, but opening like a funnel outward into the broader Thames estuary, was a plane of water distinctly higher than the plane of water on the London side. It was the opposite of the usual reservoir view, and reminded Frank of the walk he had taken with the Quiblers on the dike of Khembalung, right before the monsoon had returned and drowned the island.
Now he walked in that deracinated state characteristic of profound jetlag: sandy-eyed, mouth hung open in sleepy amazement, prone to sudden jolts of emotion. It was not particularly cold out, but the wind was raw; that was what kept him awake. When the group went back inside and took up the work on the sea-level issues, he fell asleep, unfortunately missing most of a talk he had really wanted to see, on the latest satellite-based laser altimetry measurements. An entire fleet of satellites and university and government departments had taken on the task of measuring sea level worldwide. Right before Frank fell asleep, the speaker said something about the sea-level rise slowing down lately, meaning their first pumping efforts might be having an effect, because other measurements showed the polar melting was continuing apace, in a feedback loop many considered unstoppable. This was fascinating, but Frank fell asleep anyway.
When he woke up he was chagrined, but realized he could see the paper online. The general upshot of the talk seemed to have been that they could only really stem the rise by drawing down enough CO2 to get the atmosphere back to around 250 parts per million, levels last seen in the Little Ice Age from 1200–1400 AD. People were murmuring about the nerviness of the speaker’s suggestion that they try for an ice age, but as was said immediately in rejoinder, they could always burn some carbon to warm things if they got too cold. This was another reason to bank some of the oil that remained unburned.
“I can tell you right now my wife’s going to want you to set the thermostat higher,” someone prefaced his question,