Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [159]
On the flight back from London, Frank saw that the plane had telephones in the back of the middle seats, and when he spotted the tip of the astonishing icescape that was Greenland, it occurred to him to give Wade Norton another call. He punched in the number, waited. Soon he would be talking to an acquaintance in Antarctica, while flying thirty thousand feet over the tip of Greenland. The technological sublime could be so trippy.
Wade picked up. “Hi Frank. Where are you?”
“I’m in an airliner going from London to New York, and I can see the tip of Greenland, and it still looks icy. It looks the same as always.”
“You need lasers to see the difference, except in certain fjords.”
“Is that the way it is down there too? Can you see the differences down there?”
“Well, the Ross Ice Shelf being gone is the main thing you can see. There’s still lots of ice on the land. And more all the time because of us, right?”
“Right, is that still going well?”
“Yes it is. There’s some maintenance to be done at the intakes, but by and large the prototypes are all pumping away, and they’re set to add more next season. They’re talking cubic kilometer this and cubic kilometer that—they’ve sure ramped up from gallons and cubic feet per second, did you notice?”
“Yeah sure. They had to—it was getting to be like Italian lira.”
“That’s right. Also, if you take away a few zeroes it doesn’t look out of control.”
“That’s true. Maybe that’s why the modelers at this conference were so confident we had some chance of climate stabilization.”
“Maybe so. Maybe they need to come down here and see some of the tabular bergs coming off.”
“Do you think just having that experience would change their calculations though?”
“Well, good question. But I think a lot of calculations are really trying to quantify certain assumptions, don’t you? Like in economics? Not as bad as that, of course, but still.”
“Maybe we can arrange for a conference in McMurdo.”
“Good idea! I mean, NSF would probably hate it, but maybe not. It might be good publicity. Good for the budget.”
“I’ll check with Diane about it.”
“Good. Hey, how’s it going with her?”
“Good. She and Phil seem good for each other.”
“Ah yeah, that’s nice. Phil needed someone.”
“Diane too. So hey, how’s it going with Val again?”
“Ah, well, good, good. Good when I see her. I’ll see her again in about a month.”
“Whoah. So, is she off with…?”
“Yes, I think she’s with X, for part of that time, anyway. She’s with some kind of polar cap sailing village.”
“What did you say?”
“Tents on big sleds, like catamarans. They put up sails when the wind is right and move around.”
“Like iceboats?”
“Yes, like that I guess, but they’re like big rafts, and there’s a little camp’s worth of them, moving around together.”
“Wow, that sounds interesting.”
“Yeah, they’re like Huck Finn on the ice cap.”
“So—but it’s going well when you see her.”
“Oh yeah. Sure. I can’t wait.”
“And the, the other guy?”
“I like X. We get along well. I mean, we’re friends. We don’t talk about Val, that’s understood. But other than that we’re like any other friends. We understand each other. We don’t talk about it, but we understand.”
“Interesting!” Frank said, frowning. “It’s—kind of hard to imagine.”
“I don’t even try. That’s part of how it works.”
“I see.” Though he didn’t.
“You know how it is,” Wade said. “When you’re in love, you take what you can get.”
“Ahhh.”
His plane landed at JFK in the midmorning, and after that Frank had scheduled in a layover of several hours before his commuter pop down to D.C. The plan had puzzled the woman in the White House travel office, but he had only said, “I have some business in New York that day.”
Now he got in a taxi and gave the driver the