Sixty Days and Counting

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  CUT TO THE CHASE

  Posted 11:53 PM:

  We Americans don’t want to be in a state of denial about our relationship to the world and its problems. If we’re five percent of the world’s population and we’re burning one quarter of the carbon being burned every year, we need to know that, and we need to think about why it’s happening and what it means. It’s not a trivial thing and we can’t just deny it. It’s a kind of obesity.

  There are different kinds of denial. One is sticking your head in the sand. You manage not to know anything. Like that public service ad where there’s a bunch of ostriches down on a big beach, and all the big ones have their heads in the sand, and some of the little ones do too, but a lot of the little ones are running around, and they see a giant wave is coming in and they start yelling down the holes to the big ones, There’s a wave coming! and one of the big ones pulls his head out and says Don’t worry, just stick your head in like this, and the little ones look at each other and figure that if that’s what their parents are doing it must be okay, so they stick their heads in the sand too—and in the last frame you see that all the holes in the sand are windows made of little TVs and computer screens. That kind of says it all. And there you are seeing it on TV.

  But there are other kinds of denial that are worse yet. There’s a response that says I’ll never admit I’m wrong and if it comes to a choice between admitting I’m wrong or destroying the whole world, then bring it on. This is the Götterdämmerung, in which the doomed gods decide to tear down the world as they lose the big battle. The god-damning of the world. It’s a term sometimes used to describe what Hitler did in the last months of World War Two, after it was clear Germany was going to lose the war.

  Of course people are offended by any comparison to the actions of Adolf Hitler. But consider how many species have died already, and how many more might die if we keep doing what we’re doing. It may not be genocide, but it is ugly. Species-cide. As if nothing else matters but us, and specifically the subset of us that agrees with everything we say. When you take a look at our own Rapture culture, these people pretending to expect the end of the world anytime now, you see that we have our own Götterdämmerung advocates, all very holy of course, as the world destroyers always are. And it’s an ugly thing. Countries can go crazy, we’ve seen it happen more than once. And empires always go crazy.

  But right now we need to stay sane. We don’t want the United States of America to be hauled before the World Court on a charge of attempted Götterdämmerung. We can’t let that happen, because THIS IS AMERICA, land of the free and home of the brave—the country made of people from all the other countries—the grand experiment that all world history has so far been conducting! So if we blow it, if America blows it, then all world history might be judged a failure so far. We don’t want that. We don’t want to go from being the hope of the world to convicted in the World Court of attempted Götterdämmerung.

  5,392,691 responses

  B ACK IN D.C. IT WAS STILL SO COLD that the idea that he could have been surfing the day before struck Frank as ludicrous. Crossing the continent in March was like changing planets. It was a bigger world than they thought.

  It was so many planets at once. The Hyperniño had left California, following the Pacific’s oceanic heat shift to the west, which signaled the onset of a La Niña, predicted to be devastating to Southeast Asia. Now all of California was fully in the drought that had begun in the northern half of the state several years before. The East Coast, meanwhile, was in a kind of cold drought, which included occasional dumps of snow that had the consistency of styrofoam. Like the snow in Antarctica, Charlie’s colleague Wade said in a phone call. Frank called Wade fairly often now, finding him to be the best contact person on the Antarctic situation. Every once in a while, at the end of a call, they would talk for a minute or two about personal matters, which was interesting, as they had never met. But somehow something had come up, perhaps Wade describing his plans for a coming week, and after that they both seemed to like talking to someone they had never met about these kinds of things. Wade too had a girlfriend whom he saw all too infrequently. He described himself as a desert rat, who endured the polar cold for the chance to see this woman.

  At the embassy, only the older Khembalis were used to cold. The younger ones were tropical creatures, and walked around blue-lipped; those of Rudra’s generation never seemed to notice the cold at all. They left their arms bare in really frigid temperatures.

  Rudra often was reading in bed when Frank came in, or looking at picture books. Then one day Qang brought him a laptop, and he chuckled as he tapped away at it, looking at photo collections of various sorts, including pornographic. Other times Frank found him humming to himself, or asleep with a book still swaying on his chest.

  When he was up and about, he was slower than ever. When Frank and he went for walks, they always got the wheelchair out from under the stairs; it was as if this was the way they had always done it.

  Frank said, “Listen to this: ‘If he had the earth for his pasture and the sea for his pond, he would be a pauper still. He only is rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy or demon who possesses such power as that.’ ”

  Rudra said, “Emerson?”

  “Right.” They had begun a game in which Rudra tried to guess which of the two New Englanders Frank was reading from. He did pretty well at it.

  “Good man. Means, go for a walk?”

  It was too much like a dog begging to get out. “Sure.”

  And so out they would go, Rudra bundled in down jacket and blankets against the cold he claimed not to notice, Frank in a suitable selection from his cold-weather gear. They had a route now that took them north to the Potomac under a line of tall oaks flanking Irving and Fillmore Streets. This brought them to the river at the mouth of Windy Run, which was often free of ice, and thus a temporary water hole frequented by deer, foxes, beaver, and muskrats. They looked for these regulars, and any unusual visiting animals, and then the wind would force them to turn their backs and head downstream for a bit, on a rough old asphalt sidewalk, after which they could angle up 24th Street, and thus back to the house. The walk took about an hour, and sometimes they would stop by the river for another hour. Once as they turned to go Frank saw a flash of dark flank, and had the impression it might have been some kind of antelope. It would have been the first time in Virginia he had seen a feral exotic, and as such worthy of calling in to Nancy for entry into the GIS. But he wasn’t sure, so he let it go.

  The quiet neighborhood between Rock Creek Park and Connecticut Avenue was looking more withdrawn than ever. It had always been empty-seeming compared to most of D.C., but now three or four houses had burned and not been rebuilt, and others were still boarded up from the time of the great flood. At night these dark houses gave the whole place an eerie cast.

  Some of the dark houses gleamed at the cracks or smoked from the chimneys, and if after a dusk hike in the ravine Frank was hungry, or wanted company, he would call up Spencer and see if he was in any of these places. Once when Spencer answered they established that he was inside the very house Frank was looking at.

  In Frank went, uncertain at first. But he was a familiar face now, so without further ado he helped to hold a big pot over the fire, ate broiled steak, and ended up banging on the bottom of an empty trash can while Spencer percussed his chair and sang. Robert and Robin showed up, ate, sang duets to Robert on guitar, then pressed Spencer and Frank to go out and play a round of night golf.

  It was full moon that night, and once they got going, Frank saw that they didn’t need to see to play their course. They had played it so many times that they knew every possible shot, so that when they threw they could feel in their bodies where the frisbee was going to land, could run to that spot and nine times out of ten pick it up. Although on that night they did lose one of Robert’s, and spent a few minutes looking for it before Spencer cried, as he always did in this situation, “LO AND BEHOLD,” and
they were off again.

  Socks and shoes got wet with melted snow. No snowshoes tonight, and so he leaped through drifts and abandoned his feet to their soggy fate. On a climbing expedition it would have meant disaster. But in the city it was okay. There was even a certain pleasure in throwing caution to the wind and crashing through great piles of snow, snow which ranged from powder to concrete.

  Then in one leap he hooked a foot and crashed down onto a deer’s layby, panicking the creature, who scrambled under him. Frank tried to leap away too, slipped and fell back on the doe; for a second he felt under him the warm quivering flank of the animal, like a woman trying to shrug off a fur coat. His shout of surprise seemed to catapult them both out of the hole in different directions, and the guys laughed at him. But as he ran on he could still feel in his body that sudden intimacy, the kinetic jolt: a sudden collision with a woman of another species!

  Power outages were particularly hard on the few feral exotics still out in this second winter. The heated shelters in Rock Creek Park were still operating, and they all had generators for long blackouts, but the generators made noise, and belched out their noxious exhaust, and none of the animals liked them, even the humans. On the other hand, the deep cold of these early spring nights could kill, so many animals hunkered down in the shelters when the worst cold hit, but they were not happy. It would have been better simply to be enclosed, Frank sometimes felt; or rather it was much the same thing, as they were chained to the shelters by the cold. So many different animals together in one space—it was so beautiful and unnatural, it never failed to strike Frank.

  Such gatherings gave the zoo’s zoologists a chance to do all kinds of things with the ferals, so the FOG volunteers who were cold-certified were welcomed to help. With Frank’s help, Nick was now the youngest cold-certified member of FOG, which seemed to please him in his quiet way. Certainly Frank was pleased—though he also tried to be there whenever Nick was out on FOG business in extreme cold, to make sure nothing went wrong. Hard cold was dangerous, as everyone had learned by now. The tabloids were rife with stories of people freezing in their cars at traffic lights, or on their front doorsteps trying to find the right key, or even in their own beds at night when an electric blanket failed. There were also regular Darwin Award winners out there, feeding the tabloids’ insatiable hunger for stupid disaster. Frank wondered if a time would come when people got enough disaster in their own lives that they would no longer feel a need to vampire onto others’ disasters. But it did not seem to have happened yet.

  Frank and Nick got back into a pattern in which Frank dropped by on Saturday mornings and off they would go, sipping from the steaming travel cups of coffee and hot chocolate Anna had provided. They started at the shelter at Fort de Russey, slipping in from the north. On this morning they spotted, among the usual crowd of deer and beaver, a tapir that was on the zoo’s wanted list.

  They called it in and waited uneasily for the zoo staff to arrive with the dart guns and nets and slings. They had a bad history together on this front, having lost a gibbon that fell to its death after Frank hit it with a trank dart. Neither mentioned this now, but they spoke little until the staffers arrived and one of them shot the tapir. At that the other animals bolted, and the humans approached. The big RFID chip was inserted under the tapir’s thick skin. The animal’s vital signs seemed good. Then they decided to take it in anyway. Too many tapirs had died. Nick and Frank helped hoist the animal onto a gurney big enough for all of them to get a hand on. They carried the unconscious beast through the snow like its pallbearers. From a distant ridge, the aurochs looked down on the procession.

  After that, the two of them hiked down the streambed to the zoo itself. Rock Creek had frozen solid, and was slippery underfoot wherever it was flat. Often the ice was stacked in piles, or whipped into a frothy frozen meringue. The raw walls of the flood-ripped gorge were in a freeze-thaw cycle that left frozen spills of yellow mud splayed over the ribbon of creek ice.

  Then it was up and into the zoo parking lot. The zoo itself was just waking up in the magnesium light of morning, steam frost rising from the nostrils of animals and the exhaust vents of heating systems; it looked like a hot springs in winter. There were more animals than people. Compared to Rock Creek it was crowded, however, and a good place to relax in the sun, and down another hot chocolate.

  The tigers were just out, lying under one of their powerful space heaters. They wouldn’t leave it until the sun struck them, so it was better now to visit the snow leopards, who loved this sort of weather, and indeed were creatures who could go feral in this biome and climate. There were people in FOG advocating this release, along with that of some of the other winterized predator species, as a way of getting a handle on the city’s deer infestation. But others at the zoo objected on grounds of human (and pet) safety, and it didn’t look like it would happen anytime soon. The zoo got enough grief already for its support of the feral idea; advocating predators would make things crazy.

  After lunch they would hitch a ride from a staffer back up to Frank’s van, or snowshoe back to it. If the day got over the freezing mark, the forest would become a dripping rainbow world, tiny spots of color prisming everywhere.

  Then back to the Quiblers, where Nick would have homework, or tennis with Charlie. On some days Frank would stay for lunch. Then Charlie would see him off: “So—what are you going to do now?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I could…”

  Long pause as he thought it over.

  “Not good enough, Frank. Let’s hear you choose.”

  “Okay then! I’m going to help the Khembalis move stuff out to their farm!” Right off the top of his head. “So there.”

  “That’s more like it. When are you going to see the doctor again?”

  Glumly: “Monday.”

  “That’s good. You need to find out what you’ve got going on there.”

  “Yes.” Unenthusiastically.

  “Let us know what you find out, and if there’s anything we can do to help out. If you have to like have your sinuses rotorootered, or your nose broken again to get it right or whatever.”

  “I will.”

  It still felt strange to Frank to have his health issues known to the Quiblers. But he had been trying to pursue a course of open exchange of (some) information with Anna, and apparently whatever she learned, Charlie would too, and even Nick to an extent. Frank hadn’t known it would be like that, but did not want to complain, or even to change. He was getting used to it. And it was good Charlie had asked, because otherwise he might not have been able to figure out what to do. The pressure was becoming like a kind of wall.

  So: off to Khembali House, to fill his van with a load of stuff for the farm. Out there in the snowy countryside the construction of the new compound was coming along. Enough Khembalis had gotten licensed in the various trades that they could do almost all the work legally on their own. The whole operation ran like some big family or baseball team, everyone pitching in and getting things done, the labor therefore outside the money economy. It was impressive what could be done that way.

  Frank still had his eye on the big knot of trees that stood on the high point of the farm. These were mostly chestnut oaks. They were like his treehouse tree but much bigger, forming a canopy together that covered most of an acre. It seemed to him that the interlaced heavy inner branches formed a perfect foundation or framework for a full Swiss Family extravaganza, and Padma and Sucandra liked the idea. So there was that to be considered and planned for too. Spring was about to spring, and there were materials and helpers on hand. No time like the present! Leap before you look!—but maybe peek first.

  All the various scans that Frank’s doctors had ordered had been taken, at an increasing pace as they seemed to find things calling for some speed; and now it was time to meet with the brain guy.

  This was an M.D. who did neurology, also brain and face surgery. So just in ordinary terms a very imposing figure, and in paleolithic terms, a shaman hea
ler of the rarest kind, being one who actually accomplished cures. Awesome: scarier than any witch doctor. Whenever the technological sublime was obvious, the fear in it came to the fore.

  The doctor’s office was ordinary enough, and him too. He was about Frank’s age, balding, scrubbed very clean, ultra-close-shaven, hands perfectly manicured. Used to the sight of the bros’ hands, and Rudra’s hands, Frank could scarcely believe how perfect this man’s hands were. Very important tools. They gave him a faintly wax-figurish look.

  “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing at the chair across his desk from him.

  When Frank was seated, he described what he had found in Frank’s data. “We’re seeing a chronic subdural hematoma,” he said, pointing to a light spot in an array of spots that roughly made the shape of a brain section—Frank’s brain. The CT scan and the MRI both showed evidence of this hematoma, the doctor went on, and pretty clearly it was a result of the trauma Frank had suffered. “Lots of blood vessels were broken. Most were outside the dura. That’s the sack that holds your brain.”

  Frank nodded.

  “But there are veins called bridging veins, between the dura and the surface of the brain. Some of them broke, and appear to be leaking blood.”

  “But when I taste it?”

  “That must be from encapsulated blood in scar tissue on the outside of the dura, here.” He pointed at the MRI. “Your immune system is trying to chip away at that over time, and sometimes when you swing your head hard, or raise your pulse, there might be leaking from that encapsulation into the sinus, and then down the back of your throat. That’s what you’re tasting. But the subdural hematoma is inside the dura, here. It may be putting a bit of pressure on your frontal cortex, on the right side. Have you been noticing any differences in what you think or feel?”