Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [55]
So, whereas before she had most often come home to find the house in an uproar, Charlie cooking operatically while Joe banged pots and Nick read under the lamp in his corner of the couch, with the dinner soon to be on the table, now she often got home to find Nick sitting there like an owl, reading in the dark, and no one else home at all—and her heart would go out to him, all alone at seven p.m., at age twelve—
“You’ll go blind,” she would say.
“Mom,” he would object happily.
—and she would kiss his head and turn on his light and barge around banging her toes as she turned on the other lights and went out to the kitchen to rustle something up before she starved—and sometimes there would be nothing in the fridge or the cupboards that she could cook or eat, and grumpily she would throw on her daypack and tell Nick to answer the phone, if she did not need him to come along and carry extra bags, and would walk down the street to the Giant grocery store, still grumpy at first but then enjoying the walk—
And then at the grocery store there would be no meat on the shelves, and few fresh veggies, fewer fruits. She would have to forget about her list and troll the aisles for something palatable, amazed once again at the sight of so many empty shelves—she had thought like everyone else that it would be a temporary thing—then getting angry at people for their selfish hoarding instincts. Before this winter—ever since the flood, really—people had hoarded some of the essentials, but now it had spread far beyond toilet paper and bottled water, to almost every shelf in the store. But particularly to all the foods she most liked to eat. It had gotten so bad that once, when in her hurry she had driven the car, she got back in and drove over to the smaller grocery store on Woodson, and they didn’t have any eggplant either, though she craved it. So she got zucchini instead, and back home, late, starving, made chicken soup.
All this distracted her as she worked over the data in her biostatistical studies, but it also caused her to continue to think about the situation. She had chosen to stay at NSF because she felt she could do more there, and that NSF still had a crucial part to play in the larger effort. It was a small agency but it was central, in that it coordinated basic scientific research—really the heart of all their solutions. So she continued to do her work there, organizing the grant evaluation process and running the division. And when she could she kept working on the FCCSET program she had discovered, which Diane was going to try to get OMB to get Chase to reinstate—that kind of coordination of all the federal departments and agencies into overarching project architectures was a development with huge potential. But there had to be other things she could do too. She talked to Alyssa and the others in her office about it, she talked to Diane and Edgardo, she talked to Drepung, and then to Sucandra.
Sucandra she found particularly interesting. He was the one who had been her Cognizant Program Manager, so to speak, at the Khembalung Institute for Higher Studies, and he had been the single most disconcerting person she had ever talked to about the underlying purposes of science, being a doctor himself (but of Tibetan medicine) as well as a kind of Buddhist teacher, or even mentor to her, if there could be such a thing—as well as her Tibetan tutor, which she liked the best as being the most straightforward of their interactions. But in that context she mentioned to him once her attempt to balance her scientific work with something larger, amorphous though it might be.
He said to her: “Look to China.”
The formalized