Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [202]
THEY GOT BACK TO D.C. JUST IN TIME for the Saturday of another party at the Khembali farm. It was a day on which Frank had a zoo morning scheduled with Nick, so he showed up at the Quiblers’ house at around ten.
“How was San Diego?” they asked him. They knew that he was planning to move back there.
“It was good.” He smiled what Anna called his real smile. “I found out that my girlfriend is pregnant.”
“Pregnant?” Anna cried—
“Girlfriend?” Charlie exclaimed.
The two of them looked at each other and laughed at their nicely timed response, also their mutual ignorance.
Then Anna snapped her fingers and pointed at Frank. “It’s that woman you met in the elevator, I bet.”
“Well yes, that’s right.”
“Ha! I knew it! Well!” She gave him a hug. “I guess you’re glad now that you went to that brown bag talk at NSF!”
“And came to your party afterward. Yes, that was quite a day. You did a good thing to set that up.” Frank shook his head as he remembered it. “Everything changed on that day.”
Anna clapped her hands a little. “Frank that is good news, so when do we get to meet her?”
“She’s coming to the party this afternoon, so you’ll meet her out there. She couldn’t make it to the zoo, though, she had to do some stuff.”
“Okay, good then. Off we go.”
They walked up to the Bethesda Metro, trained down to the zoo. In through the front gates—an entry Frank and Nick rarely used—past the pandas, then down toward the tigers, Joe racing ahead in perpetual danger of catching a toe and launching himself into a horrible face-plant. “Joe, slow down!” Charlie cried uselessly as he took off in pursuit.
Frank walked between Nick and Anna, all three looking for the golden tamarind monkeys and other little ferals squirreling around freely in the trees. By the time they had dropped in to see which gibbons were out, and continued down to the tiger enclosure, Joe was up on Charlie’s shoulders, and dangerously canted over the moat.
Their swimming tigers were basking in the sun. The male was draped against the tree like a tiger rug, his mouth hanging open. The female lay en couchant, long and sleek, staring sphinxlike into emptiness.
For a long time no one moved. Other people drifted by, passed on to other things.
“I saw the jaguar,” Frank told them. “It was casual at the time, or, I don’t mean casual—I was totally scared and ran away as soon as I could—but I didn’t fully get it, how great it was to see it, until a few days later.”
“Wow,” Nick said. “Did you get a GPS?”
“It was at the overlook.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Wow.”
After a while longer they went to get snowcones, even though it was just before lunch. Frank got lime; Nick got a mix of root beer, cherry, and banana.
Then Frank took off to go pick up his girlfriend, and the Quiblers went back to the house before continuing out to the farm.
The Khembalis’ party was a big one, combining as it did several celebrations, not just the Shambhala arrival, but also the Buddhist plum-blossom festival, which now would always mark the auspicious day when the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government had agreed on his return to Tibet. The treaty had been signed there in Washington, at the White House, just the day before. And now also it was Frank’s going-away party as well, and even a sort of shower; and last but not least, Phil and Diane were going to drop by for a bit. Their presence added to the crowd, as well as making the party into a kind of wedding reception, because the first couple had made their actual nuptials a completely private affair some days before. Parts of the punditocracy were squawking that this fait