Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain

Kim Stanley Robinson

B A N T A M B O O K S

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

ONE The Buddha Arrives

TWO In the Hyperpower

THREE Intellectual Merit

FOUR Science in the Capital

FIVE Athena on the Pacific

SIX The Capital in Science

SEVEN Tit for Tat

EIGHT A Paradigm Shift

NINE Trigger Event

TEN Broader Impacts

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BOOKS BY KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

COPYRIGHT PAGE

T

he Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight. A fierce inundation of photons—on average, 342 joules per

second per square meter. 4185 joules (one calorie) will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water

by one degree Celsius. If all this energy were captured by the Earth’s atmosphere, its temperature would

rise by ten degrees Celsius in one day.

Luckily much of it radiates back to space. How much depends on albedo and the chemical composition

of the atmosphere, both of which vary over time.

A good portion of Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, is created by its polar ice caps. If polar ice and snow

were to shrink significantly, more solar energy would stay on Earth. Sunlight would penetrate oceans

previously covered by ice, and warm the water. This would add heat and melt more ice, in a positive

feedback loop.

The Arctic Ocean ice pack reflects back out to space a few percent of the total annual solar energy

budget. When the Arctic ice pack was first measured by nuclear submarines in the 1950’s, it averaged

thirty feet thick in midwinter. By the end of the century it was down to fifteen. Then one August the ice

broke up into large tabular bergs, drifting on the currents, colliding and separating, leaving broad lanes of

water open to the continuous polar summer sunlight. The next year the breakup started in July, and at

times more than half the surface of the Arctic Ocean was open water. The third year, the breakup began

in May.

That was last year.

WEEKDAYS ALWAYS begin the same. The alarm goes off and you are startled out of dreams that

you immediately forget. Predawn light in a dim room. Stagger into a hot shower and try to wake up all

the way. Feel the scalding hot water on the back of your neck, ah, the best part of the day, already

passing with the inexorable clock. Fragment of a dream, you were deep in some problem set now

escaping you, just as you tried to escape it in the dream. Duck down the halls of memory—gone.

Dreams don’t want to be remembered.

Evaluate the night’s sleep. Anna Quibler decided the previous night had not been so good. She was

exhausted already. Joe had cried twice, and though it was Charlie who had gotten up to reassure him, as

part of their behavioral conditioning plan which was intended to convey to Joe that he would never again

get Mom to visit him at night, Anna had of course woken up too, and vaguely heard Charlie’s

reassurances: “Hey. Joe. What’s up. Go back to sleep, buddy, it’s the middle of the night here. Nothing

gets to happen until morning, so you might as well. This is pointless this wailing, why do you do this, good

night damn it.”

A brusque bedside manner at best, but that was part of the plan. After that she had tossed and turned

for long minutes, trying heroically not to think of work. In years past she had recited in her head Edgar

Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven,” which she had memorized in high school and which had a nice soporific

effect, but then one night she had thought to herself, “Quoth the raven, ‘Livermore,’” because of work

troubles she was having with some people out at Lawrence Livermore. After that the poem was ruined as

a sleep aid because the moment she even thought of “The Raven” she thought about work. In general

Anna’s thoughts had a tropism toward work issues.

Shower over, alas. She dried and dressed in three minutes. Downstairs she filled a lunch box for her

older boy. Nick liked and indeed insisted that his lunch be exactly the same every day, so it was no great

trouble to assemble it. Peanut butter sandwich, five carrots, apple, chocolate milk, yogurt, roll of lunch

meat, cheese stick, cookie. Two minutes for that, then throw in a freeze pack to keep it chilled. As she

got the coldpacks out of the freezer she saw the neat rows of plastic bottles full of her frozen milk, there

for Charlie to thaw and feed to Joe during the day when she was gone. That reminded her, not that she

would have forgotten much longer given how full her breasts felt, that she had to nurse the bairn before

she left. She clumped back upstairs and lifted Joe out of his crib, sat on the couch beside it. “Hey love,

time for some sleepy nurses.”

Joe was used to this, and glommed onto her while still almost entirely asleep. With his eyes closed he

looked like an angel. He was getting bigger but she could still cradle him in her arms and watch him curl

into her like a new infant. Closer to two than one now, and a regular bruiser, a wild man who wearied

her; but not now. The warm sensation of being suckled put her body back to sleep, but a part of her

mind was already at work, and so she detached him and shifted him around to the other breast for four

more minutes. In his first months she had had to pinch his nostrils together to get him to come off, but

now a tap on the nose would do it, for the first breast at least. On the second one he was more

recalcitrant. She watched the second hand on the big clock in his room sweep up and around. When they

were done he would go back to sleep and snooze happily until about nine, Charlie said.

She hefted him back into his crib, buttoned up and kissed all her boys lightly on the head. Charlie

mumbled “Call me, be careful.” Then she was down the stairs and out the door, her big work bag over

her shoulder.

The cool air on her face and wet hair woke her fully for the first time that day. It was May now and the

late spring mornings had only a little bit of chill left to them, a delicious sensation given the humid heat that

was to come. Fat gray clouds rolled just over the buildings lining Wisconsin Avenue. Truck traffic roared

south. Splashes of dawn sunlight struck the metallic blue sheen of the windows on the skyscrapers up at

Bethesda Metro, and as Anna walked briskly along it occurred to her, not for the first time, that this was

one of the high points of her day. There were some disturbing implications in that fact, but she banished

those and enjoyed the feel of the air and the tumble of the clouds over the city.

She passed the Metro elevator kiosk to extend her walk by fifty yards, then turned and clumped down

the little stairs to the bus stop. Then down the big stairs of the escalator, into the dimness of the great tube

of ribbed concrete that was the underground station. Card into the turnstile,thwack as the triangular

barriers disappeared into the unit, pull her card out and through to the escalator down to the tracks. No

train there, none coming immediately (you could hear them and feel their wind long before the lights set

into the platform began to flash) so there was no need to hurry. She sat on a concrete bench that

positioned her such that she could walk straight into the car that would let her out at Metro Center

directly in the place closest to the escalators down to the Orange Line East.

At this hour she was probably going to find an open seat on the train when it arrived, so she opened her

laptop and began to study one of the jackets, as they still called them: the grant proposals that the

National Science Foundation received at a rate of fifty thousand a year. “Mathematical and Algorithmic

Analysis of Palindromic Codons as Predictors of a Gene’s Protein Expression.” The project hoped to

develop an algorithm that had shown some success in predicting which proteins any given gene sequence

in human DNA would express. As genes expressed a huge variety of proteins, by unknown ways and

with variations that were not understood, this kind of predicting operation would be a very useful thing if

it could be done. Anna was dubious, but genomics was not her field. It would be one to give to Frank

Vanderwal. She noted it as such and queued it in a forward to him, then opened the next jacket.

The arrival of a train, the getting on and finding of a seat, the change of trains at Metro Center, the

getting off at the Ballston stop in Arlington, Virginia: all were actions accomplished without conscious

thought, as she read or pondered the proposals she had in her laptop. The first one still struck her as the

most interesting of the morning’s bunch. She would be interested to hear what Frank made of it.

Coming up out of a Metro station is about the same everywhere: up a long escalator, toward an oval of

gray sky and the heat of the day. Emerge abruptly into a busy urban scene.

The Ballston stop’s distinction was that the escalator topped out in a big vestibule leading to the multiple

glass doors of a building. Anna entered this building without glancing around, went to the nice little

open-walled shop selling better-than-usual pastries and packaged sandwiches, and bought a lunch to eat

at her desk. Then she went back outside to make her usual stop at the Starbucks facing the street.

This particular Starbucks was graced by a staff maniacally devoted to speed and precision; they went at

their work like a drum and bugle corps. Anna loved to see it. She liked efficiency anywhere she found it,

and more so as she grew older. That a group of young people could turn what was potentially a very

boring job into a kind of strenuous athletic performance struck her as admirable and heartening. Now it

cheered her once again to move rapidly forward in the long queue, and see the woman at the computer

look up at her when she was still two back in line and call out to her teammates, “Tall latte half-caf,

nonfat, no foam!” and then, when Anna got to the front of the line, ask her if she wanted anything else

today. It was easy to smile as she shook her head.

Then outside again, doubled paper coffee cup in hand, to the NSF building’s west entrance. Inside she

showed her badge to security in the hall, then crossed the atrium to get to the south elevators.

Anna liked the NSF building’s interior. The structure was hollow, featuring a gigantic central atrium, an

octagonal space that extended from the floor to the skylight, twelve stories above. This empty space, as

big as some buildings all by itself, was walled by the interior windows of all the NSF offices. Its upper

part was occupied by a large hanging mobile, made of metal curved bars painted in primary colors. The

ground floor was occupied by various small businesses facing the atrium—pizza place, hair stylist, travel

agency, bank outlet.

A disturbance caught Anna’s eye. At the far door to the atrium there was a flurry of maroon, a flash of

brass, and then suddenly a resonant low chord sounded, filling the big space with a vibratingblaaa, as if

the atrium itself were a kind of huge horn.

A bunch of Tibetans, it looked like, were now marching into the atrium: men and women wearing belted

maroon robes and yellow winged conical caps. Some played long straight antique horns, others thumped

drums or swung censers around, dispensing clouds of sandalwood. It was as if a parade entry had

wandered in from the street by mistake. They crossed the atrium chanting, skip-stepping, swirling, all in

majestic slow motion.

They headed for the travel agency, and for a second Anna wondered if they had come in to book a flight

home. But then she saw that the travel agency’s windows were empty.

This gave her a momentary pang, because these windows had always been filled by bright posters of

tropical beaches and European castles, changing monthly like calendar photos, and Anna had often stood

before them while eating her lunch, traveling mentally within them as a kind of replacement for the real

travel that she and Charlie had given up when Nick was born. Sometimes it had occurred to her that

given the kinds of political and bacterial violence that were often behind the scenes in those photos,

mental travel was perhaps the best kind.

But now the windows were empty, the small room behind them likewise. In the doorway the

Tibetanesque performers were now massing, in a crescendo of chant and brassy brass, the incredibly low

notes vibrating the air almost visibly, like the cartoon soundtrack bassoon inFantasia.

Anna moved closer, dismissing her small regret for the loss of the travel agency. New occupants, fogging

the air with incense, chanting or blowing their hearts out: it was interesting.

In the midst of the celebrants stood an old man, his brown face a maze of deep wrinkles. He smiled, and

Anna saw that the wrinkles mapped a lifetime of smiling that smile. He raised his right hand, and the music

came to a ragged end in a hyperbass note that fluttered Anna’s stomach.

The old man stepped free of the group and bowed to the four walls of the atrium, his hands held together

before him. He dipped his chin and sang, his chant as low as any of the horns, and split into two notes,

with a resonant head tone distinctly audible over the deep clear bass, all very surprising coming out of

such a slight man. Singing thus, he walked to the doorway of the travel agency and there touched the

doorjambs on each side, exclaiming something sharp each time.

“Rig yal ba! Chos min gon pa!”

The others all exclaimed“Jetsun Gyatso!”

The old man bowed to them.

And then they all cried“Om!” and filed into the little office space, the brassmen angling their long horns to

make it in the door.

A young monk came back out. He took a small rectangular card from the loose sleeve of his robe,

pulled some protective backing from sticky strips on the back of the card, and affixed it carefully to the

window next to the door. Then he retreated inside.

Anna approached the window. The little sign said

EMBASSY OF KHEMBALUNG

An embassy! And a country she had never heard of, not that that was particularly surprising, new

countries were popping up all the time, they were one of the UN’s favorite dispute-settlement strategies.

Perhaps a deal had been cut in some troubled part of Asia, and this Khembalung created as a result.

But no matter where they were from, this was a strange place for an embassy. It was very far from

Massachusetts Avenue’s ambassadorial stretch of unlikely architecture, unfamiliar flags, and expensive

landscaping; far from Georgetown, Dupont Circle, Adams-Morgan, Foggy Bottom, East Capitol Hill, or

any of the other likely haunts for locating a respectable embassy. Not just Arlington, but the NSF building

no less!

Maybe it was a scientific country.

Pleased at the thought, pleased to have something new in the building, Anna approached closer still. She

tried to read some small print she saw at the bottom of the new sign.

The young man who had put out the sign reappeared. He had a round face, a shaved head, and a quick

little mouth, like Betty Boop’s. His expressive black eyes met hers directly.

“Can I help you?” he said, in what sounded to her like an Indian accent.

“Yes,” Anna said. “I saw your arrival ceremony, and I was just curious. I was wondering where you all

come from.”

“Thank you for your interest,” the youth said politely, ducking his head and smiling. “We are from

Khembalung.”

“Yes, I saw that, but…”

“Ah. Our country is an island nation. We are living in the Bay of Bengal, near the mouth of the Ganges.”

“I see,” Anna said, surprised; she had thought they would be from somewhere in the Himalayas. “I

hadn’t heard of it.”

“It is not a big island. Nation status has been a recent development, you could say. Only now are we

establishing a representation.”

“Good idea. Although, to tell the truth, I’m surprised to see an embassy in here. I didn’t think of this as

being the right kind of space.”

“We chose it very carefully,” the young monk said.

They regarded each other.

“Well,” Anna said, “very interesting. Good luck moving in. I’m glad you’re here.”

“Thank you.” Again he nodded.

Anna did the same and took her leave.

But as she turned to go, something caused her to look back. The young monk still stood there in the

doorway, looking across at the pizza place, his face marked by a tiny grimace of distress.

Anna recognized the expression at once. When her older son Nick was born she had stayed home with

him, and those first several months of his life were a kind of blur to her. She had missed her work, and

doing it from home had not been possible. By the time maternity leave was over they had clearly needed

her at the office, and so she had started working again, sharing the care of Nick with Charlie and some

baby-sitters, and eventually a day-care center in a building in Bethesda, near the Metro stop. At first

Nick had cried furiously whenever she left for any reason, which she found excruciating; but then he had

seemed to get used to it. And so did she, adjusting as everyone must to the small pains of the daily

departure. It was just the way it was.

Then one day she had taken Nick down to the day-care center—it was the routine by then—and he

didn’t cry when she said good-bye, didn’t even seem to care or to notice. But for some reason she had

paused to look back into the window of the place, and there on his face she saw a look of unhappy,

stoical determination—determination not to cry, determination to get through another long lonely boring

day—a look which on the face of a toddler was simply heartbreaking. It had pierced her like an arrow.

She had cried out involuntarily, even started to rush back inside to take him in her arms and comfort him.

Then she reconsidered how another good-bye would affect him, and with a horrible wrenching feeling, a

sort of despair at all the world, she had left.

Now here was that very same look again, on the face of this young man. Anna stopped in her tracks,

feeling again that stab from five years before. Who knew what had caused these people to come halfway

around the world? Who knew what they had left behind?

She walked back over to him.

He saw her coming, composed his features. “Yes?”

“If you want,” she said, “later on, when it’s convenient, I could show you some of the good lunch spots

in this neighborhood. I’ve worked here a long time.”

“Why, thank you,” he said. “That would be most kind.”

“Is there a particular day that would be good?”

“Well—we will be getting hungry today,” he said, and smiled. He had a sweet smile, not unlike Nick’s.

She smiled too, feeling pleased. “I’ll come back down at one o’clock and take you to a good one then,

if you like.”

“That would be most welcome. Very kind.”

She nodded. “At one, then,” already recalibrating her work schedule for the day. The boxed sandwich

could be stored in her office’s little refrigerator.

Anna completed her journey to the south elevators. Waiting there she was joined by Frank Vanderwal.

They greeted each other, and she said, “Hey I’ve got an interesting jacket for you.”

He mock-rolled his eyes. “Is there any such thing for a burnt-out case like me?”

“Oh I think so.” She gestured back at the atrium. “Did you see our new neighbor? We lost the travel

agency but gained an embassy, from a little country in Asia.”

“An embassy, here?”

“I’m not sure they know much about Washington.”

“I see.” Frank grinned his crooked grin, a completely different thing than the young monk’s sweet smile,

sardonic and knowing. “Ambassadors from Shangri-La, eh?” One of theUP arrows lit, and the elevator

door next to it opened. “Well, we can use them.”

PRIMATES INelevators. People stood in silence looking up at the lit numbers on the display console,

as per custom.

Again the experience caused Frank Vanderwal to contemplate the nature of their species, in his usual

sociobiologist’s mode. They were mammals, social primates: a kind of hairless chimp. Their bodies,

brains, minds, and societies had grown to their current state in East Africa over a period of about two

million years, while the climate was shifting in such a way that forest cover was giving way to open

savannah.

Much was explained by this. Naturally they were distressed to be trapped in a small moving box. No

savannah experience could be compared to it. The closest analog might have been crawling into a cave,

no doubt behind a shaman carrying a torch, everyone filled with great awe and very possibly under the

influence of psychotropic drugs and religious rituals. An earthquake during such a visit to the underworld

would be about all the savannah mind could contrive as an explanation for a modern trip in an elevator

car. No wonder an uneasy silence reigned; they were in the presence of the sacred. And the last five

thousand years of civilization had not been anywhere near enough time for any evolutionary adaptations

to alter these mental reactions. They were still only good at the things they had been good at on the

savannah.

Anna Quibler broke the taboo on speech, as people would when all the fellow passengers were cohorts.

She said to Frank, continuing her story, “I went over and introduced myself. They’re from an island

country in the Bay of Bengal.”

“Did they say why they rented the space here?”

“They said they had picked it very carefully.”

“Using what criteria?”

“I didn’t ask. On the face of it, you’d have to say proximity to NSF, wouldn’t you?”

Frank snorted. “That’s like the joke about the starlet and the Hollywood writer, isn’t it?”

Anna wrinkled her nose at this, surprising Frank; although she was proper, she was not prudish. Then he

got it: her disapproval was not at the joke, but at the idea that these new arrivals would be that hapless.

She said, “I think they’re more together than that. I think they’ll be interesting to have here.”

Homo sapiensis a species that exhibits sexual dimorphism. And it’s more than a matter of bodies; the

archaeological record seemed to Frank to support the notion that the social roles of the two sexes had

deviated early on. These differing roles could have led to differing thought processes, such that it would

be possible to characterize plausibly the existence of unlike approaches even to ostensibly

non-gender-differentiated activities, such as science. So that there could be a male practice of science

and a female practice of science, in other words, and these could be substantially different activities.

These thoughts flitted through Frank’s mind as their elevator ride ended and he and Anna walked down

the hall around to their offices. Anna was as tall as he was, with a nice figure, but the dimorphism

differentiating them extended to their habits of mind and their scientific practice, and that might explain

why he was a bit uncomfortable with her. Not that this was a full characterization of his attitude. But she

did science in a way that he found annoying. It was not a matter of her being warm and fuzzy, as you

might expect from the usual characterizations of feminine thought—on the contrary, Anna’s scientific

work (she still often coauthored papers in statistics, despite her bureaucratic load) often displayed a

finicky perfectionism that made her a very meticulous scientist, a first-rate statistician—smart, quick,

competent in a range of fields and really excellent in more than one. As good a scientist as one could find

for the rather odd job of running the Bioinformatics Division at NSF, good almost to the point of

exaggeration—too precise, too interrogatory—it kept her from pursuing a course of action with drive.

Then again, at NSF maybe that was an advantage.

In any case she was so intense about it. A kind of Puritan of science, rational to an extreme. And yet of

course at the same time that was all such a front, as with the early Puritans; the hyperrational coexisted in

her with all the emotional openness, intensity, and variability that was the American female interactional

paradigm and social role. Every female scientist was therefore potentially a kind of Mr. Spock, the

rational side foregrounded and emphasized while the emotional side was denied, and the two coexisting

at odds with one another.

On the other hand, judged on that basis, Frank had to admit that Anna seemed less split-natured than

many women scientists he had known. Pretty well integrated, really. He had spent many hours of the past

year working with her, engaged in interesting discussions in the pursuit of their shared work. No, he liked

her. The discomfort came not from any of her irritating habits, not even the nit-picking or hairsplitting that

made her so strikingly eponymous (though no one dared joke about that to her), habits that she couldn’t

seem to help and didn’t seem to notice—no—it was more the way her hyperscientific attitude combined

with her passionate female expressiveness to suggest a complete science, or even a complete humanity. It

reminded Frank of himself.

Not of the social self that he allowed others to see, admittedly; but of his internal life as he alone

experienced it. He too was stuffed with extreme aspects of both rationality and emotionality. This was

what made him uncomfortable: Anna was too much like him. She reminded him of things about himself he

did not want to think about. But he was helpless to stop his trains of thought. That was one of his

problems.

Halfway around the circumference of the sixth floor, they came to their offices. Frank’s was one of a

number of cubicles carving up a larger space; Anna’s was a true office right across from his cubicle, a

room of her own, with a foyer for her secretary Aleesha. Both their spaces, and all the others in the maze

of crannies and rooms, were filled with the computers, tables, file cabinets, and crammed bookshelves

that one found in scientific offices everywhere. The decor was standard degree-zero beige for everything,

indicating the purity of science.

In this case it was all rendered human, and even handsome, by the omnipresent big windows on the

interior sides of the rooms, allowing everyone to look across the central atrium and into all the other

offices. This combination of open space and the sight of fifty to a hundred other humans made each office

a slice or echo of the savannah. The occupants were correspondingly more comfortable at the primate

level. Frank did not suffer the illusion that anyone had consciously planned this effect, but he admired the

instinctive grasp on the architect’s part of what would get the best work out of the building’s occupants.

He sat down at his desk. He had angled his computer screen away from the window so that when

necessary he could focus on it, but now he sat in his chair and gazed out across the atrium. He was near

the end of his yearlong stay at NSF, and the workload, while never receding, was simply becoming less

and less important to him. Piles of articles and hard-copy jackets lay in stacks on every horizontal

surface, arranged in Frank’s complex throughput system. He had a lot of work to do. Instead he looked

out the window.

The colorful mobile filling the upper half of the atrium was a painfully simple thing, basic shapes in

primary colors, very like a kindergartner’s scribble. Frank’s many activities included rock climbing, and

often he had occupied his mind by imagining the moves he would need to make to climb the mobile.

There were some hard sections, but it would make for a fun route.

Past the mobile, he could see into one hundred and eight other rooms (he had counted). In them people

typed at screens, talked in couples or on the phone, read, or sat in seminar rooms around paper-strewn

tables, looking at slide shows, or talking. Mostly talking. If the interior of the National Science

Foundation were all you had to go on, you would have to conclude that doing science consisted mostly

of sitting around in rooms talking.

This was not even close to true, and it was one of the reasons Frank was bored. The real action of

science took place in laboratories, and anywhere else experiments were being conducted. What

happened here was different, a kind of metascience, one might say, which coordinated scientific activities,

or connected them to other human action, or funded them. Something like that; he was having trouble

characterizing it, actually.

The smell of Anna’s Starbucks latte wafted in from her office next door, and he could hear her on the

phone already. She too did a lot of talking on the phone. “I don’t know, I have no idea what the other

sample sizes are like…. No, not statistically insignificant, that would mean the numbers were smaller than

the margin of error. What you’re talking about is just statistically meaningless. Sure, ask him, good idea.”

Meanwhile Aleesha, her assistant, was on her phone as well, patiently explaining something in her rich

D.C. contralto. Unraveling some misunderstanding. It was an obvious if seldom acknowledged fact that

much of NSF’s daily business was accomplished by a cadre of African-American women from the local

area, women who often seemed decidedly unconvinced of the earth-shattering importance that their

mostly Caucasian employers attributed to the work. Aleesha, for instance, displayed the most skeptical

politeness Frank had ever seen; he often tried to emulate it, but without, he feared, much success.

Anna appeared in the doorway, tapping on the doorjamb as she always did, to pretend that his space

was an office. “Frank, I forwarded a jacket to you, one about an algorithm.”

“Let’s see if it arrived.” He hitCHECK MAIL , and up came a new one fromaquibler@nsf.gov. He

loved that address. “It’s here, I’ll take a look at it.”

Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain

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