Green Earth. Kim Stanley Robinson
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Frank was not willing to go this far. “It’s a matter of what you can see,” he suggested. “You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it’s given to you. You have it. Then you’re forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you’ve created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books.”
“But the rich are all over the news! Everyone can see they have more than they have earned, because no one really earns that much.”
“The only things people understand are sensory,” Frank insisted. “We’re hardwired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts like surplus value, or statistics on the value of a year’s work, these just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Edgardo said cheerfully. “We are stupid!”
“I’ve got to get back to it,” Anna said, and left. It really wasn’t her kind of conversation.
Frank followed her out, and finally headed home. He drove his little fuel-cell Honda out Old Dominion Parkway, already jammed; over the Beltway, and then up to a condo complex called Swink’s New Mill, where he had rented a condominium for his year at NSF.
He parked in the complex’s cellar garage and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. His apartment looked out toward the Potomac—a long view and a nice apartment, rented to Frank for the year by a young State Department guy who was doing a stint in Brasília. It was furnished in a stripped-down style that suggested the man did not live there very often. But a nice kitchen, functional spaces, everything easy, and most of the time Frank was there he was asleep, so he didn’t care what it was like.
He had picked up one of the free papers back at work, and now he looked at the Personals section, a regrettable habit he had had for years, fascinated as he was by this glimpse into a subworld of radically efflorescing sexual diversity. Were people like this really out there, or were these merely the fantasies of a bunch of lonely souls like himself? The sections devoted to people looking for LTRs, meaning “long-term relationships,” sometimes struck him with force. ISO LTR: in search of long-term relationship. The species had evolved toward monogamy, it was wired into the brain. Not a cultural imposition, but a biological instinct. They might as well be storks.
And so he read the ads, but never replied. He was only here for a year. It made no sense to take any action on this front. The ads themselves also tended to stop him.
Husband hunting, SWF, licensed nurse, seeks a hardworking, handsome SWM for LTR. Must be a dedicated Jehovah’s Witness.
SBM, 5'5", shy, quiet, a little bit serious, seeking Woman, age open. Not good-looking or wealthy but Nice Guy. Enjoy foreign movies, opera, theater, music, books, quiet evenings.
These were not going to get a lot of responses. Frank could have written their ur-text, and one time he had, and had even sent it in, as a joke of course—it would make some of them laugh. And if any woman liked the joke well enough to call, well, that would have been a sign.
Male Homo sapiens desires company of female Homo sapiens for mutual talk and grooming behaviors, possibly mating and reproduction. Must be happy, run fast.
But no one had replied.
He went out onto the bas-relief balcony, into the sultry late afternoon. Another two months and he would be going home, back to his real life. Thinking about that reminded him of the grant application from Yann Pierzinski. He went inside to his laptop and googled Yann to try to learn more about what he had been up to. Then he reopened the application. Recursion at the boundary limit … it was interesting.
Finally he called up Derek Gaspar at Torrey Pines Generique.
“What’s up?” Derek said after the preliminaries.
“Well, I just got a grant proposal from one of your people, and I’m wondering if you can tell me anything about it.”
“From one of mine, what do you mean?”
“A Yann Pierzinski, do you know him?”
“No, never heard of him. He works here you say?”
“He was there on a temporary contract, working with Simpson. He’s a postdoc from Caltech.”
“Ah yeah, here we go. Mathematician, got a paper in Biomathematics on algorithms.”
“Yeah, that comes up first on my Google too.”
“Well sure. I can’t be expected to know everyone who ever worked with us here, that’s hundreds of people, you know that.”
“Sure sure.”
“So what’s his proposal about? Are you going to give him a grant?”
“Not up to me, you know that. We’ll see what the panel says. But meanwhile, maybe you should check it out.”
“Oh you like it then.”
“I think it may be interesting, it’s hard to tell. Just don’t drop him.”
“Well, our records show him as already gone back to Pasadena. Like you said, his gig here was temporary.”
“Aha. Man, your research groups have been gutted.”
“Not gutted, Frank, though we’re down to the bare bones in some areas. That’s one of the reasons I’ll be happy when you’re back out here.”
“I don’t work for Torrey Pines anymore.”
“No, but maybe you could rejoin us when you move back.”
“Maybe. If you get new financing.”
“I’m trying, believe me. That’s why I’d like to have you back on board.”
“We’ll see. I’ll be out looking for a place to live in a couple of weeks, I’ll come see you then.”
“Good, make an appointment with Susan.”
Frank clicked off his phone, sat back in his chair thinking it over. Derek was like a lot of first-generation CEOs of biotech start-ups. He had come out of the biology department at UCSD, and his business acumen had been gained on the job. Some people managed to do this successfully, others didn’t, but all tended to fall behind on the science, and had to take on faith what was really possible in the labs. Certainly Derek could use some help in guiding policy.
Frank went back to studying the grant proposal. There were elements of the algorithm missing, as was typical, but he could see the potential for a very powerful method there. Earlier in the day he had thought he saw a way to plug one of the gaps that Pierzinski had left …
“Hmmmm,” he said to the empty room.
On his return to San Diego, he could perhaps set things up quite nicely. There were some potential problems, of course. NSF’s guidelines stated that NSF always kept a public right use for all grant-subsidized work. That would keep any big gains from going to any individual or company, if it was awarded a grant. Private control could only be kept if no public money had been granted.
Also, the P.I. on the proposal was Pierzinski’s advisor at Caltech, battening off the work of his students in the usual way. Caltech and the P.I. would hold the rights to anything the project made, along with NSF, even if Pierzinski later moved. So, assuming Pierzinski moved back to Torrey Pines Generique soon, it would be best if this particular proposal of his failed. Then if the algorithm worked and became patentable, Torrey Pines would keep all the profit from whatever it made. A big patent was often worth billions.
This line of thought made Frank feel jumpy. In fact he was on his feet, pacing out to the mini-balcony and back in. Then he remembered he had been planning to go to Great Falls anyway. He pulled his climbing kit out of the closet, changed clothes, and went back down to his car.
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