Fifty Degrees Below. Kim Stanley Robinson
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fingertips. He tried to swallow all his questions.
But some of these questions represented a change of subject, a move to safer ground. ‘So – tell me what you mean exactly when you say surveillance? What do you do?’
‘There are different levels. For you, it’s almost all documentary. Credit cards, phone bills, e-mail, computer files.’
‘Whoah.’
‘Well, hey. Think about it. Physical location too, sometimes. Although mostly that’s at the cell phone records level. That isn’t very precise. I mean, I know you’re staying over off of Connecticut somewhere, but you don’t have an address listed right now. So, maybe staying with someone else. That kind of stuff is obvious. If they wanted to, they could chip you. And your new van has a transponder, it’s GPS-able.’
‘Shit.’
‘Everyone’s is. Like transponders in airplanes. It’s just a question of getting the code and locking on.’
‘My Lord.’
Frank thought it over. There was so much information out there. If someone had access to it, they could find out a tremendous amount. ‘Does NSF know this kind of stuff is going on with their people?’
‘No. This is a black-black.’
‘And your husband, he does what?’
‘He’s at a higher level.’
‘Uh oh.’
‘Yeah. But look, I don’t want to talk about that now. Some other time.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know. Some other time.’
‘When we meet again?’
She smiled wanly. ‘Yes. When we meet again. Right now,’ lighting up her watch and peering at it, ‘shit. I have to get back. My friends will be getting up soon. They go to work early.’
‘Okay … You’ll be okay?’
‘Oh yeah. Sure.’
‘And you’ll call me again?’
‘Yes. I’ll need to pick my times. I need to have a clear space, and be able to call you from a clean phone. There’s some protocols we can establish. We’ll talk about it. We’ll set things up. But now I’ve gotta go.’
‘Okay.’
A peck of a kiss and she was off into the night.
He drove his van back to the edge of Rock Creek Park, sat in the driver’s seat thinking. There was still an hour before dawn. For about half an hour it rained. The sound on the van’s roof was like a steel drum with only two notes, both hit all the time.
Caroline. Married but unhappy. She had called him, she had kissed him. She knew him, in some sense; which was to say, she had him under surveillance. Some kind of security program based on the virtual wagers of some MIT computers, for Christ’s sake. Perhaps that was not as bad as it first sounded. A pro forma exercise. As compared to a bad marriage. Sneaking out at three in the morning. It was hard to know what to feel.
With the first grays of dawn the rain stopped, and he got out and walked into the park. Bird calls of various kinds: cheeps, trills; then a night thrush, its little melodies so outrageous that at first they seemed beyond music, they were to human music as dreams were to art – stranger, bolder, wilder. Birds singing in the forest at dawn, singing, The rain has stopped! The day is here! I am here! I love you! I am singing!
It was still pretty dark, and when he came to the gorge overlook he pulled a little infrared scope he had bought out of his pocket, and had a look downstream to the waterhole. Big red bodies, shimmering in the blackness; they looked like some of the bigger antelopes to Frank, maybe the elands. Those might bring the jaguar out. A South American predator attacking African prey, as if the Atlantic had collapsed back to this narrow ravine and they were all in Gondwanaland together. Far in the distance he could hear the siamangs’ dawn chorus, he assumed; they sounded very far away. Suddenly something inside his chest ballooned like a throat pouch, puffed with happiness, and to himself (to Caroline) he whispered, ‘ooooooooop! oooooooop!’
He listened to the siamangs, and sang under his breath with them, and fitted his digital camera to the night scope to take some IR photos of the drinking animals for FOG. In the growing light he could see them now without the scope. Black on gray. He wondered if the same siamang or gibbon made the first call every morning. He wondered if its companions were lying on branches in comfort, annoyed to be awakened; or if sleeping in the branches was uncomfortable, and all of them thus ready and waiting to get up and move with the day. Maybe this differed with animal, or circumstance – as with people – so that sometimes they snoozed through those last precious moments, before the noise became so raucously operatic that no one could sleep through it. Even at a distance it was a thrilling sound; and now it was the song of meeting Caroline, and he quit trying not to spook the big ungulents at the waterhole and howled. ‘OOOOOOOOP! OoooooooooOOOOOOOOP OOP! OOP!’
He felt flooded. He had never felt like this before, it was some new emotion, intense and wild. No excess of reason for him, not any more! What would the guru say about this? Did the old man ever feel like this? Was this love, then, and him encountering it for the first time, not ever knowing before what it was? It was true she was married. But there were worse entanglements. It didn’t sound like it was going to last. He could be patient. He would wait out the situation. He would have to wait for another call, after all.
Then he saw one of the gibbons or siamangs, across the ravine and upstream, swinging through branches. A small black shape, like a big cat but with very long arms. The classic monkey shape. He caught sight of white cheeks and knew that it was one of the gibbons. White-cheeked gibbons. The whoops had sounded miles away, but they might have been closer all along. In the forest it was hard to judge.
There were more of them, following the first. They flew through the trees like crazy trapeze artists, improvising every swing. Brachiation: amazing. Frank photographed them too, hoping the shots might help the FOG people get an ID. Brachiating through the trees, no plan or destination, just free-forming it through the branches. He wished he could join them and fly like Tarzan, but watching them he knew just what an impossible fantasy that was. Hominids had come down out of the trees, they were no longer arboreal. Tarzan was wrong, and even his treehouse was a throwback.
Upstream the three eland looked up at the disturbance, then continued to drink their fill. Frank stood on the overlook, happily singing his rising glissando of animal joy, ‘oooooooooop!’
And speaking of animals, there was a party at the re-opened National Zoo, scheduled for later that very morning.
The National Zoo, perched as it was on a promontory overlooking a bend in the Rock Creek gorge, had been hammered by the great flood. Lipping over from the north, the surge had rushed down to meet the rise of the Potomac, and the scouring had torn a lot of the fencing and landscaping away. Fortunately most of the buildings and enclosures were made of heavy concrete, and where their foundations had not been undercut, they had survived intact. The National Park system had been able to fund the repairs internally, and given that most of the released animals had survived the flood, and been rounded up afterward rather easily (indeed some had returned to the zoo site as soon as the water subsided), repairs had proceeded with great dispatch. The Friends of the National Zoo, numbering nearly two thousand now, had pitched in with their labor and their collective memory of the park, and the reconstructed version now opening to the public looked very like the original, except for a certain odd rawness.
The tiger and lion enclosure, at the southern end of the park, was a circular island divided into four quadrants, separated by a moat and a high outer wall from the human observers. The trees on the island had survived, although they looked strangely sparse and bedraggled for June.
On this special morning the returning crowd was joined by the Khembali legation, on hand to repeat their swimming tigers’ welcoming ceremony, so ironically interrupted