Forty Signs of Rain sitc-1

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Now she said, “But you do support attempts to make objective studies of such matters?”

  “Of course,” Sucandra replied. “Buddhist science is much like Western science in that regard.”

  Anna nodded, brow furrowed like a hawk. Her definition of science was extremely narrow. “Reproducible studies?”

  “Yes, that is Buddhism precisely.”

  Now Anna’s eyebrows met in a deep vertical furrow that split the horizontal ones higher on her brow. “I thought Buddhism was a kind of feeling, you know—meditation, compassion?”

  “This is to speak of the goal. What the investigation is for. Same for you, yes? Why do you pursue the sciences?”

  “Well—to understand things better, I guess.”

  This was not the kind of thing Anna thought about. It was like asking her why she breathed.

  “And why?” Sucandra persisted, watching her.

  “Well—just because.”

  “A matter of curiosity.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “But what if curiosity is a luxury?”

  “How so?”

  “In that first you must have a full belly. Good health, a certain amount of leisure time, a certain amount of serenity. Absence of pain. Only then can one be curious.”

  Anna nodded, thinking it over.

  Sucandra saw this and continued. “So, if curiosity is a value—a quality to be treasured—a form of contemplation, or prayer—then you must reduce suffering to reach that state. So, in Buddhism, understanding works to reduce suffering, and by reduction of suffering gains more knowledge. Just like science.”

  Anna frowned. Charlie watched her, fascinated. This was a basic part of her self, this stuff, but largely unconsidered. Self-definition by function. She was a scientist. And science was science, unlike anything else.

  Rudra Cakrin leaned forward to say something to Sucandra, who listened to him, then asked him a question in Tibetan. Rudra answered, gesturing at Anna.

  Charlie shot a quick look at her—see, he was following things! Evidence!

  Rudra Cakrin insisted on something to Sucandra, who then said to Anna, “Rudra wants to say, ‘What do you believe in?’”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. ‘What do you believe in?’ he says.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, surprised. “I believe in the double blind study.”

  Charlie laughed, he couldn’t help it. Anna blushed and beat on his arm, crying “Stop it! It’s true.”

  “I know it is,” Charlie said, laughing harder, until she started laughing too, along with everyone else, the Khembalis looking delighted—everyone so amused that Joe got mad and stomped his foot to make them stop. But this only made them laugh more. In the end they had to stop so he would not throw a fit.

  Rudra Cakrin restored his mood by diving back into the blocks. Soon he and Joe sat half-buried in them, absorbed in their play. Stack them up, knock them down. They certainly spoke the same language.

  The others watched them, sipping tea and offering particular blocks to them at certain moments in the construction process. Sucandra and Padma and Anna and Charlie and Nick sat on the couches, talking about Khembalung and Washington D.C. and how much they were alike.

  Then one tower of cubes and beams stood longer than the others had. Rudra Cakrin had constructed it with care, and the repetition of basic colors was pretty: blue, red, yellow, green, blue, yellow, red, green, blue, red, green, red. It was tall enough that ordinarily Joe would have already knocked it over, but he seemed to like this one. He stared at it, mouth hanging open in a less-than-brilliant expression. Rudra Cakrin looked over at Sucandra, said something. Sucandra replied quickly, sounding displeased, which surprised Charlie. Drepung and Padma were suddenly paying attention. Rudra Cakrin picked out a yellow cube, showed it to Sucandra and said something more. He put it on the top of the tower.

  “Oooh,” Joe said. He tilted his head to one side, then the other, observing it.

  “He likes that one,” Charlie noted.

  At first no one answered. Then Drepung said, “It’s an old Tibetan pattern. You see it in mandalas.” He looked to Sucandra, who said something sharp in Tibetan. Rudra Cakrin replied easily, shifted so that his knee knocked a long blue cylinder into the tower, collapsing it. Joe shuddered as if startled by a noise on the street.

  “Ah ga,” he declared.

  The Tibetans resumed the conversation. Nick was now explaining to Padma the distinction between whales and dolphins. Sucandra went out and helped Charlie a bit with the cleanup in the kitchen; finally Charlie shooed him out, feeling embarrassed that their pots were going to end up substantially cleaner after this visit than they had been before; Sucandra had been expertly scrubbing their bottoms with a wire pad found under the sink.

  Around nine-thirty they took their leave. Anna offered to call a cab, but they said the Metro was fine. They did not need guidance back to the station: “Very easy. Interesting too. There are many fine carpets in the windows of this part of town.”

  Charlie was about to explain that this was the work of Iranians who had come to Washington after the fall of the Shah, but then he thought better of it. Not a happy precedent: the Iranians had never left.

  Instead he said to Sucandra, “I’ll give my friend Sridar a call and ask him to meet with you. He’ll be very helpful, even if you don’t end up hiring his firm.”

  “I’m sure. Many thanks.” And they were off into the balmy night.

  IV

  Science in the Capital

  What’s New From the Department of Unfortunate Statistics?

  Extinction Rate in Oceans Now Faster Than on Land. Coral Reef Collapses Leading to Mass Extinctions; Thirty Percent of Warm-water Species Estimated Gone. Fishing Stocks Depleted, UN Declares Scaleback Necessary or Commercial Species Will Crash.

  Topsoil Loss Nears a Million Acres a Year. Deforestation now faster in temperate than tropical forests. Only 35% of tropical forests left.

  The average Indian consumes 200 kilograms of grain a year; the average American, 800 kilograms; the average Italian, 400 kilograms. The Italian diet was rated best in the world for heart disease.

  300 Tons of Weapons-grade Uranium and Plutonium Unaccounted For. High Mutation Rate of Microorganisms Near Radioactive Waste-treatment Sites. Antibiotics in Animal Feed Reduce Medical Effectiveness of Antibiotics for Humans. Environmental estrogens suspected in lowest-ever human sperm counts.

  Two Billion Tons of Carbon Added to the Atmosphere This Year. One of the five hottest years on record. The Fed Hopes U.S. Economy Will Grow by Four Percent in the Final Quarter.

  Anna Quibler was in her office getting pumped. Her door was closed, the drapes (installed for her) were drawn. The pump was whirring in its triple sequence: low sigh, wheeze, clunk. The big suction cup made its vacuum pull during the wheeze, tugging her distended left breast outward and causing drips of white milk to fall off the end of her nipple. The milk then ran down a clear tube into the little clear bag in a plastic protective tube, which she would fill to the ten ounce mark.

  It was an unconscious activity by now, and she was working on her computer while it happened. She only had to remember not to overfill the bottle, and to switch breasts. Her right breast produced more than the left even though they were the same size, a mystery that she had given up solving. She had long since explored the biological and engineering details of this process, and had gotten not exactly bored, but as far as she could go with it, and used to the sameness of it all. There was nothing new to investigate, so she was on to other things. What Anna liked was to study new things. This was what kept her coauthoring papers with her sometime-collaborators at Duke, and kept her on the editorial board of The Journal of Statistical Biology, despite the fact that her job at NSF as director of the Bioinformatics Division might be said to be occupying her more than full-time already; but much of that job was administrative, and like the milk pumping, fully explored. It was in her other projects where she could still
learn new things.

  Right now her new thing was a little search investigating the NSF’s ability to help Khembalung. She navigated her way through the on-line network of scientific institutions with an ease born of long practice, click by click.

  Among NSF’s array of departments was an Office of International Science and Engineering, which Anna was impressed to find had managed to garner ten percent of the total NSF budget. It ran an International Biological Program, which sponsored a project called TOGA—“ Tropical Oceans, Global Atmosphere.” TOGA funded study programs, many including an infrastructure-dispersion element, in which the scientific infrastructure built for the work was given to the host institution at the end of the study period.

  Anna had already been tracking NSF’s infrastructure-dispersion programs for another project, so she added this one to that list too. Projects like these were why people joked about the mobile hanging in the atrium being meant to represent a hammer and sickle, deconstructed so that outsiders would not recognize the socialistic nature of NSF’s tendency to give away capital and to act as if everyone owned the world equally. Anna liked these tendencies and the projects that resulted, though she did not think of them in political terms. She just liked the way NSF focused on work rather than theory or talk. That was her preference too. She liked quantitative solutions to quantified problems.

  In this case, the problem was the Khembalis’ little island (fifty-two square kilometers, their website said), which was clearly in all-too-good a location to contribute to ongoing studies of Gangean flooding and tidal storms in the Indian Ocean. Anna tapped at her keyboard, bookmarking for an e-mail to Drepung, cc-ing also the Khembalung Institute for Higher Studies, which he had told her about. This institute’s website indicated it was devoted to medicinal and religious studies (whatever those were, she didn’t want to know) but that would be all right—if the Khembalis could get a good proposal together, the need for a wider range of fields among their researchers could become part of its “broader impacts” element, and thus an advantage.

  She searched the web further. USGCRP, the “U.S. Global Change Research Program,” two billion dollars a year; the South Asian START Regional Research Centre (SAS-RRC), based at the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi, stations in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Mauritius…China and Thailand, aerosol study…INDOEX, the Indian Ocean Experiment, also concerned with aerosols, as was its offspring, Project Asian Brown Cloud. These studied the ever-thickening haze covering South Asia and making the monsoon irregular, with disastrous results. Certainly Khembalung was well-situated to join that study. Also ALGAS, the “Asia Least Cost Greenhouse Gas Abatement Strategy”; and LOICZ, “ Land Ocean Interaction in the Coastal Zones.” That one had to be right on the money. Sri Lanka was the leader there, lots of estuarine modeling—Khembalung would make a perfect study site. Training, networking, bio-geo-chemical cycle budgeting, socioeconomic modeling, impacts on the coastal systems of South Asia. Bookmark the site, add to the e-mail. A research facility in the mouth of the Ganges would be a very useful thing for all concerned.

  “Ah shit.”

  She had overflowed the milk bottle. Not the first time for that mistake. She turned off the pump, poured off some of the milk from the full bottle into a four-ounce sack. She always filled quite a few four-ouncers, for use as snacks or supplements when Joe was feeling extra hungry; she had never told Charlie that most of these were the result of her inattention. Since Joe often was extra hungry, Charlie said, they were useful.

  As for herself, she was starving. It was always that way after pumping sessions. Each twenty ounces of milk she gave was the result of some thousand calories burned by her in the previous day, as far as she had been able to calculate; the analyses she had found had been pretty rough. In any case, she could with a clear conscience (and great pleasure) run down to the pizza place and eat till she was stuffed. Indeed she needed to eat or she would get light-headed.

  But first she had to pump the other breast at least a little, because let-down happened in both when she pumped, and she would end up uncomfortable if she didn’t. So she put the ten-ouncer in the little refrigerator, then got the other side going into the four-ouncer, while printing out a list of all the sites she had visited, so that over her lunch she could write notes on them before she forgot what she had learned.

  She called Drepung, who answered his cell phone number.

  “Drepung, can you meet for lunch? I’ve got some ideas for how you might get some science support there in Khembalung. Some of it’s from NSF, some from elsewhere.”

  “Yes, of course Anna, thanks very much. I’ll meet you at the Food Factory in twenty minutes, if that’s all right, I’m just trying to buy some shoes for Rudra down the street here.”

  “Perfect. What kind are you getting him?”

  “Running shoes. He’ll love them.”

  On her way out she ran into Frank, also headed for the elevator.

  “What you got?” he asked, gesturing at her list.

  “Some stuff for the Khembalis,” she said. “Various programs we run or take part in that might help them out.”

  “So they can study how to adapt to higher sea levels?”

  She frowned. “No, it’s more than that. We can get them a lot of infrastructural help if it’s configured right.”

  “Good. But, you know. In the end they’re going to need more than studies. And NSF doesn’t do remediation. It just serves its clients. Pays for their studies.”

  Frank’s comment bugged Anna, and after a nice lunch with Drepung she went up to her office and called Sophie Harper, NSF’s liaison to Congress.

  “Sophie, does NSF ever do requests for proposals?”

  “Not for a long time. In general it’s been policy to make the program proposal-driven.”

  “So is there any way that NSF can, you know, set the agenda so to speak?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. We ask Congress for funding in very specific ways, and they earmark the money they give us for very specific purposes.”

  “So we might be able to ask for funds for various things?”

  “Yes, we do that. I think the way to think of it is that science sets its own agenda. To tell the truth, that’s why the appropriations committees don’t like us very much.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they hold the purse strings, honey. And they’re very jealous of that power. I’ve had senators who believe the Earth is flat say to me, ‘Are you trying to tell me that you know what’s good for science better than I do?’ And of course that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell them, because it’s true, but what can you say? That’s the kind of person we sometimes have to deal with. Even with the best of committees, there’s a basic dislike for science’s autonomy.”

  “But we’re only free to study things.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Anna sighed. “I don’t either. Listen Sophie, thanks for that. I’ll get back to you when I have a better idea what I’m trying to ask.”

  “Always here. Check out NSF’s history pages on the website, you’ll learn some things you didn’t know.”

  Anna hung up, and then did that very thing.

  She had never gone to the website’s history pages before; she was not much for looking back. But she valued Sophie’s advice, and as she read, she realized Sophie had been right; because she had worked there for so long, unconsciously she had felt that she knew the Foundation’s story. But it wasn’t true.

  Basically it was a story of science struggling to extend its reach in the world, with mixed success. After World War Two, Vannevar Bush, head of the wartime Office of Science and Technology, advocated a permanent federal agency to support basic scientific research. He argued that it was their basic scientific research that had won the war (radar, penicillin, the bomb), and Congress had been convinced, and had passed a bill bringing the NSF into being.

  After that it was one battle after another, with both Congress and the President,
contesting how much say scientists would have in setting national policy. President Truman forcing a presidentially selected board of directors on the Foundation in the beginning. President Nixon abolishing the Office of Science and Technology, which NSF had in effect staffed, replacing it with a single “scientific advisor.” The Gingrich Congress abolishing its Office of Technology Assessment. The Bush administrations zeroing out major science programs in every single budget. On it went.

  Only occasionally in this political battle did science rally and win a few. After Sputnik, scientists were begged to take over again; NSF’s budget had ballooned. Then in the 1960’s, when everyone was an activist, NSF had created a program called “Interdisciplinary Research Relevant to Problems of Our Society.” What a name from its time that was!

  Although, come to think of it, the phrase described very well what Anna had had in mind when querying Sophie in the first place. Interdisciplinary research, relevant to problems of our society—was that really such a sixties joke of an idea?

  Back then, IRRPOS had morphed into RANN, “Research Applied to National Needs.” RANN had then gotten killed for being too applied; President Nixon had not liked its objections to his antiballistic missile defense. At the same time he preemptively established the EPA so that it would be under him rather than Congress.

  The battle for control of science went on. Many administrations and Congresses hadn’t wanted technology or the environment assessed at all, as far as Anna could see. It might get in the way of business. They didn’t want to know.

  For Anna there could be no greater intellectual crime. It was incomprehensible to her: they didn’t want to know. And yet they did want to call the shots. To Anna this was clearly crazy. Even Joe’s logic was stronger. How could such people exist, what could they be thinking? On what basis did they build such an incoherent mix of desires, to want to stay ignorant and to be powerful as well? Were these two parts of the same insanity?