Читать книгу Forty Signs of Rain - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 6

Mathematics sometimes seems like a universe of its own. But it comes to us as part of the brain’s engagement with the world, and appears to be part of the world, its structure or recipe.

Over historical time humanity has explored further and further into the various realms of mathematics, in a cumulative and collective process, an ongoing conversation between the species and reality. The discovery of the calculus. The invention of formal arithmetic and symbolic logic, both mathematicizing the instinctive strategies of human reason, making them as distinct and solid as geometric proofs. The attempt to make the entire system contained and self-consistent. The invention of set theory, and the finessing of the various paradoxes engendered by considering sets as members of themselves. The discovery of the incompletability of all systems. The step-by-step mechanics of programming new calculating machines. All this resulted in an amalgam of maths and logic, the symbols and methods drawn from both realms, combining in the often long and complicated operations that we call algorithms.

In the time of the development of the algorithm, we also made discoveries in the real world: the double helix within our cells. DNA. Within half a century the whole genome was read, base pair by base pair. Three billion base pairs, parts of which are called genes, and serve as instruction packets for protein creation.

But despite the fully explicated genome, the details of its expression and growth are still very mysterious. Spiralling pairs of cytosine, guanine, adenosine, and thymine: we know these are instructions for growth, for the development of life, all coded in sequences of paired elements. We know the elements; we see the organisms. The code between them remains to be learned.

Mathematics continues to develop under the momentum of its own internal logic, seemingly independent of everything else. But several times in the past, purely mathematical developments have later proved to be powerfully descriptive of operations in nature that were either unknown or unexplainable at the time the math was being developed. This is a strange fact, calling into question all that we think we know about the relationship between maths and reality, the mind and the cosmos.

Perhaps no explanation of this mysterious adherence of nature to mathematics of great subtlety will ever be forthcoming. Meanwhile, the operations called algorithms become ever more convoluted and interesting to those devising them. Are they making portraits, recipes, magic spells? Does reality use algorithms, do genes use algorithms? The mathematicians can’t say, and many of them don’t seem to care. They like the work, whatever it is.

Leo Mulhouse kissed his wife Roxanne and left their bedroom. In the living room the light was halfway between night and dawn. He went out onto their balcony: screeching gulls, the rumble of the surf against the cliff below. The vast grey plate of the Pacific Ocean.

Leo had married into this spectacular house, so to speak; Roxanne had inherited it from her mother. Its view from the edge of the sea cliff in Leucadia, California, was something Leo loved, but the little grass yard below the second-storey porch was only about fifteen feet wide, and beyond it was an open gulf of air and the grey foaming ocean, eighty feet below. And not that stable a cliff. He wished that the house had been placed a little farther back on its lot.

Back inside, fill his travel coffee cup, down to the car. Down Europa, past the Pannikin, hang a right and head to work.

The Pacific Coast Highway in San Diego County was a beautiful drive at dawn. In any kind of weather it was handsome: in new sun with all the pale blues lifting out of the sea, in scattered cloud when shards and rays of horizontal sunlight broke through, or on rainy or foggy mornings when the narrow but rich palette of greys filled the eye with the subtlest of gradations. The grey dawns were by far the most frequent, as the region’s climate settled into what appeared to be a permanent El Niño – the Hyperniño, as people called it. The whole idea of a Mediterranean climate leaving the world, even in the Mediterranean, people said. Here coastal residents were getting sunlight deficiency disorders, and taking vitamin D and anti-depressants to counteract the effects, even though ten miles inland it was a cloudless baking desert all the year round. The June Gloom had come home to roost.

Leo Mulhouse took the coast highway to work every morning. He liked seeing the ocean, and feeling the slight roller-coaster effect of dropping down to cross the lagoons, then motoring back up little rises to Cardiff, Solano Beach and Del Mar. These towns looked best at this hour, deserted and as if washed for the new day. Hiss of tyres on wet road, wet squeak of windshield wipers, distant boom of the waves breaking – it all combined to make a kind of aquatic experience, the drive like surfing, up and down the same bowls every time, riding the perpetual wave of land about to break into the sea.

Up the big hill onto Torrey Pines, past the golf course, quick right into Torrey Pines Generique. Down into its parking garage, descending into the belly of work. Into the biotech beast.

Meaning a complete security exam, just to get in. If they didn’t know what you came in with, they wouldn’t be able to judge what you went out with. So, metal detector, inspection by the bored security team with their huge coffee cups, computer turned on, hardware and software check by experts, sniff-over by Clyde the morning dog, trained to detect signature molecules: all standard in biotech now, after some famous incidents of industrial espionage. The stakes were too high to trust anybody.

Then Leo was inside the compound, walking down long white hallways. He put his coffee on his desk, turned on his desktop computer, went out to check the experiments in progress. The most important current one was reaching an endpoint, and Leo was particularly interested in the results. They had been using high-throughput screening of some of the many thousands of proteins listed in the Protein Data Bank at UCSD, trying to identify some that would activate certain cells in a way that would make these cells express more high-density lipoprotein than they would normally – perhaps ten times as much. Ten times as much HDL, the ‘good cholestorol’, would be a life-saver for people suffering from any number of ailments – atherosclerosis, obesity, diabetes, even Alzheimer’s. Any one of these ailments mitigated (or cured!) would be worth billions; a therapy that helped all of them would be – well. It explained the high-alert security enclosing the compound, that was for sure.

The experiment was proceeding but not yet done, so Leo went back to his office and drank his coffee and read Bioworld Today onscreen. Higher through-put screening robotics, analysis protocols for artificial hormones, proteomic analyses – every article could have described something that was going on at Torrey Pines Generique. The whole industry was looking for ways to improve the hunt for therapeutic proteins, and for ways to get those proteins into living people. Half the day’s articles were devoted to one of these problems or the other, as in any other issue of the newszine. They were the recalcitrant outstanding problems, standing between ‘biotechnology’ as an idea and medicine as it actually existed. If they didn’t solve these problems, the idea and the industry based on it could go the way of nuclear power, and turn into something that somehow did not work out. If they did solve them, then it would turn into something more like the computer industry in terms of financial returns – not to mention the impacts on health of course!

When Leo next checked the lab, two of his assistants, Marta and Brian, were standing at the bench, both wearing lab coats and rubber gloves, working the pipettes on a bank of flasks filling a countertop.

‘Good morning guys.’

‘Hey Leo.’ Marta aimed her pipette like a power-point cursor at the small window on a long low refrigerator. ‘Ready to check it out?’

‘Sure am. Can you help?’

‘In just a sec.’ She moved down the bench.

Brian said, ‘This better work, because Derek just told the press that it was the most promising self-healing therapy of the decade.’

Leo was startled to hear this. ‘No. You’re kidding.’

‘I’m not kidding.’

‘Oh not really. Not really.’

‘Really.’

‘How could he?’

‘Press release. Also calls to his favourite reporters, and on his webpage. The chat room is already talking about the ramifications. They’re betting one of the big pharms will buy us within the month.’

‘Please Bri, don’t be saying these things.’

‘Sorry, but you know Derek.’ Brian gestured at one of the computer screens glowing on the bench across the way. ‘It’s all over.’

Leo squinted at a screen. ‘It wasn’t on Bioworld Today.’

‘It will be tomorrow.’

The company’s website Breaking News box was blinking. Leo leaned over and jabbed it. Yep – lead story. HDL factory, potential for obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease …

‘Oh my God,’ Leo muttered as he read. ‘Oh my God.’ His face was flushed. ‘Why does he do this?’

‘He wants it to be true.’

‘So what? We don’t know yet.’

With her sly grin Marta said, ‘He wants you to make it happen, Leo. He’s like the Roadrunner and you’re Wile E. Coyote. He gets you to run off the edge of a cliff, and then you have to build the bridge back to the cliff before you fall.’

‘But it never works! He always falls!’

Marta laughed at him. She liked him, but she was tough. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This time we’ll do it.’

Leo nodded, tried to calm down. He appreciated Marta’s spirit, and liked to be at least as positive as the most positive person in any given situation. That was getting tough these days, but he smiled the best he could and said, ‘Yeah, right, you’re good,’ and started to put on rubber gloves.

‘Remember the time he announced that we had haemophilia A whipped?’ Brian said.

‘Please.’

‘Remember the time he put out a press release saying he had decapitated mice at a thousand r.p.m. to show how well our therapy worked?’

‘The guillotine turntable experiment?’

‘Please,’ Leo begged. ‘No more.’

He picked up a pipette and tried to focus on the work. Withdraw, inject, withdraw, inject – alas, most of the work in this stage was automated, leaving people free to think whether they wanted to or not. After a while Leo left them to it and went back to his office to check his e-mail, then helplessly to read what portion of Derek’s press release he could stomach. ‘Why does he do this, why why why?’

It was a rhetorical question, but Marta and Brian were now standing in the doorway, and Marta was implacable: ‘I tell you – he thinks he can make us do it.’

‘It’s not us doing it,’ Leo protested, ‘it’s the gene. We can’t do a thing if the altered gene doesn’t get into the cell we’re trying to target.’

‘You’ll just have to think of something that will work.’

‘You mean like, build it and they will come?’

‘Yeah. Say it and they will make it.’

Out in the lab a timer beeped, sounding uncannily like the Roadrunner. Beep-beep! Beep-beep! They went to the incubator and read the graph paper as it rolled out of the machine, like a receipt out of an automated teller – like money out of an automated teller, in fact, if the results were good. One very big wad of twenties rolling out into the world from nowhere, if the numbers were good.

And they were. They were very good. They would have to plot it to be sure, but they had been doing this series of experiments for so long that they knew what the raw data would look like. The data were good. So now they were like Wile E. Coyote, standing in midair staring amazed at the viewers, because a bridge from the cliff had magically extended out and saved them. Saved them from the long plunge of a retraction in the press and subsequent Nasdaq free-fall.

Except that Wile E. Coyote was invariably premature in his sense of relief. The Roadrunner always had another devastating move to make. Leo’s hand was shaking.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I would be totally celebrating right now if it weren’t for Derek. Look at this –’ pointing – ‘it’s even better than before.’

‘See, Derek knew it would turn out like this.’

‘The fuck he did.’

‘Pretty good numbers,’ Brian said with a grin. ‘Paper’s almost written too. It’s just plug these in and do a conclusion.’

Marta said, ‘Conclusions will be simple, if we tell the truth.’

Leo nodded. ‘Only problem is, the truth would have to admit that even though this part works, we still don’t have a therapy, because we haven’t got targeted delivery. We can make it but we can’t get it into living bodies where it needs to be.’

‘You didn’t read the whole website,’ Marta told him, smiling angrily again.

‘What do you mean?’ Leo was in no mood for teasing. His stomach had already shrunk to the size of a walnut.

Marta laughed, which was her way of showing sympathy without admitting to any. ‘He’s going to buy Urtech.’

‘What’s Urtech?’

‘They have a targeted delivery method that works.’

‘What do you mean, what would that be?’

‘It’s new. They just got awarded the patent on it.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Oh my God. It hasn’t been validated?’

‘Except by the patent, and Derek’s offer to buy it, no.’

‘Oh my God. Why does he do this kind of stuff?’

‘Because he intends to be the CEO of the biggest pharmaceutical of all time. Like he told People magazine.’

‘Yeah right.’

Torrey Pines Generique, like most biotech start-ups, was undercapitalized, and could only afford a few rolls of the dice. One of them had to look promising to attract the capital that would allow it to grow further. That was what they had been trying to accomplish for the five years of the company’s existence, and the effort was just beginning to show results with these experiments. What they needed now was to be able to insert their successfully tailored gene into the patient’s own cells, so that afterwards it would be the patient’s own body producing increased amounts of the needed proteins. If that worked, there would be no immune response from the body’s immune system, and with the protein being produced in therapeutic amounts, the patient would be not just helped, but cured.

Amazing.

But (and it was getting to be a big but) the problem of getting the altered DNA into living patients’ cells hadn’t been solved. Leo and his people were not physiologists, and they hadn’t been able to do it. No one had. Immune systems existed precisely to keep these sorts of intrusions from happening. Indeed, one method of inserting the altered DNA into the body was to put it into a virus and give the patient a viral infection, benign in its ultimate effects because the altered DNA reached its target. But since the body fought viral infections, it was not a good solution. You didn’t want to compromise further the immune systems of people who were already sick.

So, for a long time now they had been in the same boat as everyone else, chasing the holy grail of gene therapy, a ‘targeted non-viral delivery system’. Any company that came up with such a system, and patented it, would immediately have the method licensed for scores of procedures, and very likely one of the big pharmaceuticals would buy the company, making everyone in it rich, and often still employed. Over time the pharmaceutical might dismantle the acquisition, keeping only the method, but at that point the startup’s employees would be wealthy enough to laugh that off – retire and go surfing, or start up another start-up and try to hit the jackpot again. At that point it would be more of a philanthropic hobby than the cut-throat struggle to make a living that it often seemed before the big success arrived.

So the hunt for a targeted non-viral delivery system was most definitely on, in hundreds of labs around the world. And now Derek had bought one of these labs. Leo stared at the new announcement on the company website. Derek had to have bought it on spec, because if the method had been well-proven, there was no way Derek would have been able to afford it. Some biotech firm even smaller than Torrey Pines – Urtech, based in Bethesda, Maryland (Leo had never heard of it) – had convinced Derek that they had found a way to deliver altered DNA into humans. Derek had made the purchase without consulting Leo, his chief research scientist. His scientific advice had to have come from his vice president, Dr Sam Houston, an old friend and early partner. A man who had not done lab work in a decade.

So. It was true.

Leo sat at his desk, trying to relax his stomach. They would have to assimilate this new company, learn their technique, test it. It had been patented, Leo noted, which meant they had it exclusively at this point, as a kind of trade secret – a concept many working scientists had trouble accepting. A secret scientific method? Was that not a contradiction in terms? Of course a patent was a matter of public record, and eventually it would enter the public domain. So it wasn’t a trade secret in literal fact. But at this stage it was secret enough. And it could not be a sure thing. There wasn’t much published about it, as far as Leo could tell. Some papers in preparation, some papers submitted, one paper accepted – he would have to check that one out as soon as possible – and a patent. Sometimes they awarded them so early. One or two papers were all that supported the whole approach.

Secret science. ‘God damn it,’ Leo said to his room. Derek had bought a pig in a poke. And Leo was going to have to open the poke and poke around.

There was a hesitant knock on his opened door, and he looked up.

‘Oh hi, Yann, how are you?’

‘I’m good Leo, thanks. I’m just coming by to say goodbye. I’m back to Pasadena now, my job here is finished.’

‘Too bad. I bet you could have helped us figure out this pig in a poke we just bought.’

‘Really?’

Yann’s face brightened like a child’s. He was a true mathematician, and had what Leo considered to be the standard mathematician personality: smart, spacy, enthusiastic, full of notions. All these qualities were a bit under the surface, until you really got him going. As Marta had remarked, not unkindly (for her), if it weren’t for the head tilt and the speed-talking, he wouldn’t have seemed like a mathematician at all. Whatever; Leo liked him, and his work on protein identification had been really interesting, and potentially very helpful.

‘Actually, I don’t know what we’ve got yet,’ Leo admitted. ‘It’s likely to be a biology problem, but who knows? You sure have been helpful with our selection protocols.’

‘Thanks, I appreciate that. I may be back anyway, I’ve got a project going with Sam’s math team that might pan out. If it does they’ll try to hire me on another temporary contract, he says.’

‘That’s good to hear. Well, have fun in Pasadena in the meantime.’

‘Oh I will. See you soon.’

And their best biomaths guy slipped out the door.

Charlie Quibler had barely woken when Anna left for work. He got up an hour later to his own alarm, woke up Nick with difficulty, got him to dress and eat, put the still-sleeping Joe in his car seat while Nick climbed in the other side of the car. ‘Have you got your backpack and your lunch?’ – this not always being the case – and off to Nick’s school. They dropped him off, returned home to fall asleep again on the couch, Joe never waking during the entire process. An hour or so later he would rouse them both with his hungry cries, and then the day would really begin, the earlier interval like a problem dream that always played out the same.

‘Joey and Daddy!’ Charlie would say then, or ‘Joe and Dad at home, here we go!’ or ‘How about breakfast? Here – how about you get into your playpen for a second, and I’ll go warm up some of Mom’s milk.’

This had always worked like a charm with Nick, and sometimes Charlie forgot and put Joe down in the old blue plastic playpen in the living room, but if he did Joe would let out a scandalized howl the moment he saw where he was. Joe refused to associate with baby things; even getting him into the car seat or the baby backpack or the stroller was a matter of very strict invariability. Where choices were known to be possible, Joe rejected the baby stuff as an affront to his dignity.

So now Charlie had Joe there with him in the kitchen, crawling underfoot or investigating the gate that blocked the steep stairs to the cellar. Careering around like a human pinball. Anna had taped bubblewrap to all the corners; it looked like the kitchen had just recently arrived and not yet been completely unpacked.

‘Okay watch out now, don’t. Don’t! Your bottle will be ready in a second.’

‘Ba!’

‘Yes, bottle.’

This was satisfactory, and Joe plopped on his butt directly under Charlie’s feet. Charlie worked over him, taking some of Anna’s frozen milk out of the freezer and putting it in a pot of warming water on the back burner. Anna had her milk stored in precise quantities of either four or ten ounces, in tall or short permanent plastic cylinders that were filled with disposable plastic bags, capped by brown rubber nipples that Charlie had pricked many times with a needle, and topped by snap-on plastic tops to protect the nipples from contamination in the freezer. Contamination in the freezer? Charlie had wanted to ask Anna, but he hadn’t. There was a lab book on the kitchen counter for Charlie to fill out the times and amounts of Joe’s feedings. Anna liked to know these things, she said, to determine how much milk to pump at work. So Charlie logged in while the water started to bubble, thinking as he always did that the main purpose here was to fulfil Anna’s pleasure in making quantified records of any kind.

He was testing the temperature of the thawed milk by taking a quick suck on the nipple when his phone rang. He whipped on a headset and answered.

‘Hi Charlie, it’s Roy.’

‘Oh hi Roy, what’s up?’

‘Well I’ve got your latest draft here and I’m about to read it, and I thought I’d check first to see what I should be looking for, how you solved the IPCC stuff.’

‘Oh yeah. The new stuff that matters is all in the third section.’ The bill as Charlie had drafted it for Phil would require the US to act on certain recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

‘Did you kind of bury the part about us conforming to IPCC findings?’

‘I don’t think there’s earth deep enough to bury that one. I tried to put it in a context that made it look inevitable. International body that we are part of, climate change clearly real, the UN the best body to work through global issues, support for them pretty much mandatory for us or else the whole world cooks in our juices, that sort of thing.’

‘Well, but that’s never worked before, has it? Come on, Charlie, this is Phil’s big pre-election bill and you’re his climate guy, if he can’t get this bill out of committee then we’re in big trouble.’

‘Yeah I know. Wait just a second.’

Charlie took another test pull from the bottle. Now it was at body temperature, or almost.

‘A bit early to be hitting the bottle, Charlie, what you drinking there?’

‘Well, I’m drinking my wife’s breast milk, if you must know.’

‘Say what?’

‘I’m testing the temperature of one of Joe’s bottles. They have to be thawed to a very exact temperature or else he gets annoyed.’

‘So you’re drinking your wife’s breast milk out of a baby bottle?’

‘Yes I am.’

‘How is it?’

‘It’s good. Thin but sweet. A potent mix of protein, fat and sugar. No doubt the perfect food.’

‘I bet.’ Roy cackled. ‘Do you ever get it straight from the source?’

‘Well I try, sure, who doesn’t, but Anna doesn’t like it. She says it’s a mixed message and if I don’t watch out she’ll wean me when she weans Joe.’

‘Ah ha. So you have to take the long-term view.’

‘Yes. Although actually I tried it one time when Joe fell asleep nursing, so she couldn’t move without waking him. She was hissing at me and I was trying to get it to work but apparently you have to suck much harder than, you know, one usually would, there’s a trick to it, and I still hadn’t gotten any when Joe woke up and saw me. Anna and I froze, expecting him to freak out, but he just reached out and patted me on the head.’

‘He understood!’

‘Yeah. It was like he was saying I know how you feel, Dad, and I will share with you this amazing bounty. Didn’t you Joe?’ he said, handing him the warmed bottle. He watched with a smile as Joe took it one-handed and tilted it back, elbow thrown out like Popeye with a can of spinach. Because of all the pinpricks Charlie had made in the rubber nipples, Joe could choke down a bottle in a few minutes, and he seemed to take great satisfaction in doing so. No doubt a sugar rush.

‘Okay, well, you are a kinky guy my friend and obviously deep in the world of domestic bliss, but we’re still relying on you here and this may be the most important bill Phil introduces in this session.’

‘Come on, it’s a lot more than that, young man, it’s one of the few chances we have left to avoid complete global disaster, I mean –’

‘Preaching to the converted! Preaching to the converted!’

‘I certainly hope so.’

‘Sure sure. Okay, I’ll read this draft and get back to you a.s.a.p., I want to move on with this, and the committee discussion is now scheduled for Tuesday.’

‘That’s fine, I’ll have my phone with me all day.’

‘Sounds good, I’ll be in touch, but meanwhile be thinking about how to slip the IPCC thing in even deeper.’

‘Yeah okay but see what I did already.’

‘Sure bye.’

‘Bye.’

Charlie pulled off the headset and turned off the stove. Joe finished his bottle, inspected it, tossed it casually aside.

‘Man, you are fast,’ Charlie said as he always did. One of the mutual satisfactions of their days together was doing the same things over and over again, and saying the same things about them. Joe was not as insistent on pattern as Nick had been, in fact he liked a kind of structured variability, as Charlie thought of it, but the pleasure in repetition was still there.

There was no denying his boys were very different. When Nick had been Joe’s age, Charlie had still found it necessary to hold him cradled in his arm, head wedged in the nook of his elbow, to make him take the bottle, because Nick had had a curious moment of aversion, even when he was hungry. He would whine and refuse the nipple, perhaps because it was not the real thing, perhaps because it had taken Charlie months to learn to puncture the bottle nipples with lots of extra holes. In any case he would refuse and twist away, head whipping from side to side, and the hungrier he was the more he would do it, until with a rush like a fish to a lure he would strike, latching on and sucking desperately. It was a fairly frustrating routine, part of the larger Shock of Lost Adult Freedom that had hammered Charlie so hard that first time around, though now he could hardly remember why. A perfect image for all the compromised joys and irritations of Mr Momhood, those hundreds of sessions with reluctant Nick and his bottle.

With Joe life was in some ways much easier. Charlie was more used to it, for one thing, and Joe, though difficult in his own ways, would certainly never refuse a bottle.

Now he decided he would try again to climb the baby gate and dive down the cellar stairs, but Charlie moved quickly to detach him, then shooed him out into the dining room while cleaning up the counter, ignoring the loud cries of complaint.

‘Okay okay! Quiet! Hey, let’s go for a walk! Let’s go walk!’

‘No!’

‘Ah come on. Oh wait, it’s your day for Gymboree, and then we’ll go to the park and have lunch, and then go for a walk!’

‘NO!’

But that was just Joe’s way of saying yes.

Charlie wrestled him into the baby backpack, which was mostly a matter of controlling his legs, not an easy thing. Joe was strong, a compact animal with bulging thigh muscles, and though not as loud a screamer as Nick had been, a tough guy to overpower. ‘Gymboree, Joe! You love it! Then a walk, guy, a walk to the park!’

Off they went.

First to Gymboree, located in a big building just off Wisconsin. Gymboree was a chance to get infants together when they did not have some other daycare to do it. It was an hour-long class, and always a bit depressing, Charlie felt, to be paying to get his kid into a play situation with other kids; but there it was; without Gymboree they all would have been on their own.

Joe disappeared into the tunnels of a big plastic jungle gym. It may have been a commercial replacement for real community, but Joe didn’t know that; all he saw was that it had lots of stuff to play with and climb on, and so he scampered around the colourful structures, crawling through tubes and climbing up things, ignoring the other kids to the point of treating them as movable parts of the apparatus, which could cause problems. ‘Oops, say you’re sorry, Joe. Sorry!’

Off he shot again, evading Charlie. He didn’t want to waste any time. Once again the contrast with Nick could not have been more acute. Nick had seldom moved at Gymboree. One time he had found a giant red ball and stood embracing the thing for the full hour of the class. All the moms had stared sympathetically (or not), and the instructor, Ally, had done her best to help Charlie get him interested in something else; but Nick would not budge from his mystical red ball.

Embarrassing. But Charlie was used to that. The problem was not just Nick’s immobility or Joe’s hyperactivity, but the fact that Charlie was always the only dad there. Without him it would have been a complete momspace, and comfortable as such. He knew that his presence wrecked that comfort. It happened in all kinds of infant-toddler contexts. As far as Charlie could tell, there was not a single other man inside the Beltway who ever spent the business hours of a weekday with preschool children. It just wasn’t done. That wasn’t why people moved to DC. It wasn’t why Charlie had moved there either, for that matter, but he and Anna had talked it over before Nick was born, and they had come to the realization that Charlie could do his job (on a part-time basis anyway) and their infant care at the same time, by using phone and e-mail to keep in contact with Senator Chase’s office. Phil Chase himself had perfected the method of working at a distance back when he had been the World’s Senator, always on the road; and being the good guy he was, he had thoroughly approved of Charlie’s plan. While on the other hand Anna’s job absolutely required her to be at work at least fifty hours a week, and often more. So Charlie had happily volunteered to be the stay-at-home parent. It would be an adventure.

And an adventure it had been, there was no denying that. But first time’s a charm; and now he had been doing it for over a year with kid number two, and what had been shocking and all-absorbing with kid number one was now simply routine. The repetitions were beginning to get to him. Joe was beginning to get to him.

So now Charlie sat there in Gymboree, hanging with the moms and the nannies. A nice situation in theory, but in practice a diplomatic challenge of the highest order. No one wanted to be misunderstood. No one would regard it as a coincidence if he happened to end up talking to one of the more attractive women there, or to anyone in particular on a regular basis. That was fine with Charlie, but with Joe doing his thing, he could not completely control the situation. There was Joe now, doing it again – going after a black-haired little girl who had the perfect features of a model. Charlie was obliged to go over and make sure Joe didn’t mug her, as he was wont to do with girls he liked, and yes, the little girl had an attractive mom, or in this case a nanny – a young blonde au pair from Germany whom Charlie had spoken to before. Charlie could feel the eyes of the other women on him; not a single adult in that room believed in his innocence.

‘Hi Asta.’

‘Hello Charlie.’

He even began to doubt it himself. Asta was one of those lively European women of twenty or so who gave the impression of being a decade ahead of their American contemporaries in terms of adult experiences – not easy, given the way American teens were these days. Charlie felt a little surge of protest: it’s not me who goes after the babes, he wanted to shout, it’s my son! My son the hyperactive girl-chasing mugger! But of course he couldn’t do that, and now even Asta regarded him warily, perhaps because the first time they had chatted over their kids he had made some remark complimenting her on her child’s nice hair. He felt himself begin to blush again, remembering the look of amused surprise she had given him as she corrected him.

Singalong saved him from the moment. It was designed to calm the kids down a bit before the session ended and they had to be lassoed back into their car seats for the ride home. Joe took Ally’s announcement as his cue to dive into the depths of the tube structure, where it was impossible to follow him or to coax him out. He would only emerge when Ally started ‘Ring Around the Rosie’, which he enjoyed. Round in circles they all went, Charlie avoiding anyone’s eye but Joe’s. Ally, who was from New Jersey, belted out the lead, and so all the kids and moms joined her loudly in the final chorus:

‘Eshes, eshes, we all, fall, DOWN!’

And down they all fell.

Then it was off to the park.

Their park was a small one, located just west of Wisconsin Avenue a few blocks south of their home. A narrow grassy area held a square sandpit, which contained play structures for young kids. Tennis courts lined the south edge of the park. Out against Wisconsin stood a fire station, and to the west a field extended out to one of the many little creeks that still cut through the grid of streets.

Midday, the sandpit and the benches flanking it were almost always occupied by a few infants and toddlers, moms and nannies. Many more nannies than moms here, most of them West Indian, to judge by their appearance and voices. They sat on the benches together, resting in the steamy heat, talking. The kids wandered on their own, absorbed or bored.

Joe kept Charlie on his toes. Nick had been content to sit in one spot for long periods of time, and when playing he had been pathologically cautious; on a low wooden bouncy bridge his little fists had gone white on the chain railing. Joe however had quickly located the spot on the bridge that would launch him the highest – not the middle, but about halfway down to it. He would stand right there and jump up and down in time to the wooden oscillation until he was catching big air, his unhappy expression utterly different from Nick’s, in that it was caused by his dissatisfaction that he could not get higher. This was part of his general habit of using his body as an experimental object, including walking in front of kids on swings, etc. Countless times Charlie had been forced to jerk him out of dangerous situations, and they had become less frequent only because Joe didn’t like how loud Charlie yelled afterwards. ‘Give me a break!’ Charlie would shout. ‘What do you think, you’re made of steel?’

Now Joe was flying up and down on the bouncy bridge’s sweet spot. The sad little girl whose nanny talked on the phone for hours at a time wandered in slow circles around the merry-go-round. Charlie avoided meeting her eager eye, staring instead at the nanny and thinking it might be a good idea to stuff a note into the girl’s clothes. ‘Your daughter wanders the Earth bored and lonely at age two – SHAME!’

Whereas he was virtuous. That would have been the point of such a note, and so he never wrote it. He was virtuous, but bored. No that wasn’t really true. That was a disagreeable stereotype. He therefore tried to focus and play with his second-born. It was truly unfair how much less parental attention the second child got. With the first, although admittedly there was the huge Shock of Lost Adult Freedom to recover from, there was also the deep absorption of watching one’s own offspring – a living human being whose genes were a fifty-fifty mix of one’s own and one’s partner’s. It was frankly hard to believe that any such process could actually work, but there the kid was, out walking the world in the temporary guise of a kind of pet, a wordless little animal of surpassing fascination.

Whereas with the second one it was as they all said: just try to make sure they don’t eat out of the cat’s dish. Not always successful in Joe’s case. But not to worry. They would survive. They might even prosper. Meanwhile there was the newspaper to read.

But now here they were at the park, Joe and Dad, so might as well make the best of it. And it was true that Joe was more fun to play with than Nick had been at that age. He would chase Charlie for hours, ask to be chased, wrestle, fight, go down the slide and up the steps again like a perpetuum mobile. All this in the middle of a DC May day, the air going for a triple-triple, the sun smashing down through the wet air and diffusing until its light exploded out of a huge patch of the zenith. Sweaty gasping play, yes, but never a moment spent coaxing. Never a dull moment.

After another such runaround they sprawled on the grass to eat lunch. Both of them liked this part. Fruit juices, various baby foods carefully spooned out and inserted into Joe’s baby-bird mouth, apple sauce likewise, a Cheerio or two that he could choke down by himself. He was still mostly a breast-milk guy.

When they were done Joe struggled up to play again.

‘Oh God Joe, can’t we rest a bit.’

‘No!’

Ballasted by his meal, however, he staggered as if drunk. Naptime, as sudden as a blow to the head, would soon fell him.

Charlie’s phone beeped. He slipped in an earplug and let the cord dangle under his face, clicked it on. ‘Hello.’

‘Hi Charlie, where are you?’

‘Hey Roy. I’m at the park like always. What’s up?’

‘Well, I’ve read your latest draft, and I was wondering if you could discuss some things in it now, because we need to get it over to Senator Winston’s office so they can see what’s coming.’

‘Is that a good idea?’

‘Phil thinks we have to do it.’

‘Okay, what do you want to discuss?’

There was a pause while Roy found a place in the draft. ‘Here we go. Quote, the Congress, being deeply concerned that the lack of speed in America’s conversion from a hydrocarbon to a carbohydrate fuel economy is rapidly leading to chaotic climate changes with a profoundly negative impact on the US economy, unquote, we’ve been told that Ellington is only concerned, not deeply concerned. Should we change that?’

‘No, we’re deeply concerned. He is too, he just doesn’t know it.’

‘Okay, then down in the third paragraph in the operative clauses, quote, the United States will peg hydrocarbon fuel reductions in a two-to-one ratio to such reductions by China and India, and will provide matching funds for all tidal and wind power plants built in those countries and in all countries that fall under a five in the UN’s prospering countries index, these plants to be operated by a joint powers agency that will include the United States as a permanent member; four, these provisions will combine with the climate-neutral power production –’

‘Wait, call that power generation.’

‘Power generation, okay, such that any savings in environmental mitigation in participating countries as determined by IPCC ratings will be credited equally to the US rating, and not less than fifty million dollars per year in savings is to be earmarked specifically for the construction of more such climate-neutral power plants; and not less than fifty million dollars per year in savings is to be earmarked specifically for the construction of so-called ‘carbon sinks’, meaning any environmental engineering project designed to capture and sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide safely, in forests, peat beds, oceans, or other locations –’

‘Yeah hey you know carbon sinks are so crucial, scrubbing CO₂ out of the air may eventually turn out to be our only option, so maybe we should reverse those two clauses. Make carbon sinks come first and the climate-neutral power plants second in that paragraph.’

‘You think?’

‘Yes. Definitely. Carbon sinks could be the only way that our kids, and about a thousand years’ worth of kids actually, can save themselves from living in Swamp World. From living their whole lives on Venus.’

‘Or should we say Washington DC.’

‘Please.’

‘Okay, those are flip-flopped then. So that’s that paragraph, now, hmm, that’s it for text. I guess the next question is, what can we offer Winston and his gang to get them to accept this version.’

‘Get Winston’s people to give you their list of riders, and then pick the two least offensive ones and tell them they’re the most we could get Phil to accept, but only if they accept our changes first.’

‘But will they go for that?’

‘No, but – wait – Joe?’

Charlie didn’t see Joe anywhere. He ducked to be able to see under the climbing structure to the other side. No Joe.

‘Hey Roy let me call you back okay? I gotta find Joe he’s wandered off.’

‘Okay, give me a buzz.’

Charlie clicked off and yanked the earplug out of his ear, jammed it in his pocket.

‘JOE!’

He looked around at the West Indian nannies – none of them were watching, none of them would meet his eye. No help there. He jogged south to be able to see farther around the back of the fire station. Ah ha! There was Joe, trundling full speed for Wisconsin Avenue.

‘JOE! STOP!’

That was as loud as Charlie could shout. He saw that Joe had indeed heard him, and had redoubled the speed of his diaper-waddle towards the busy street.

Charlie took off in a sprint after him. ‘JOE!’ he shouted as he pelted over the grass. ‘STOP! JOE! STOP RIGHT THERE!’ He didn’t believe that Joe would stop, but possibly he would try to go even faster, and fall.

No such luck. Joe was in stride now, running like a duck trying to escape something without taking flight. He was on the sidewalk next to the fire station, and had a clear shot at Wisconsin, where trucks and cars zipped by as always.

Charlie closed in, cleared the fire station, saw big trucks bearing down; if Joe catapulted off the kerb he would be right under their wheels. By the time Charlie caught up to him he was so close to the edge that Charlie had to grab him by the back of his shirt and lift him off his feet, whirling him around in a broad circle through the air, back onto Charlie as they both fell in a heap on the sidewalk.

‘Ow!’ Joe howled.

‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING!’ Charlie shouted in his face. ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DON’T EVER DO THAT AGAIN!’

Joe, amazed, stopped howling for a moment. He stared at his father, face crimson. Then he recommenced howling.

Charlie shifted into a crosslegged position, hefted the crying boy into his lap. He was shaking, his heart was pounding; he could feel it tripping away madly in his hands and chest. In an old reflex he put his thumb to the other wrist and watched the seconds pass on his watch for fifteen seconds. Multiply by four. Impossible. One hundred and eighty beats a minute. Surely that was impossible. Sweat was pouring out of all his skin at once. He was gasping.

The parade of trucks and cars continued to roar by, inches away. Wisconsin Avenue was a major truck route from the Beltway into the city. Most of the trucks entirely filled the right lane, from kerb to lane line; and most were moving at about forty miles an hour.

‘Why do you do that?’ Charlie whispered into his boy’s hair. Suddenly he was filled with fear, and some kind of dread or despair. ‘It’s just crazy.’

‘Ow,’ Joe said.

Big shuddering sighs racked them both.

Charlie’s phone rang. He clicked it on and held an earplug to his ear.

‘Hi love.’

‘Oh hi hon!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Oh nothing, nothing. I’ve just been chasing Joe around. We’re at the park.’

‘Wow, you must be cooking. Isn’t it the hottest part of the day?’

‘Yeah it is, almost, but we’ve been having fun so we stayed. We’re about to head back now.’

‘Okay, I won’t keep you. I just wanted to check if we had any plans for next weekend.’

‘None that I know of.’

‘Okay, good. Because I had an interesting thing happen this morning, I met a bunch of people downstairs, new to the building. They’re like Tibetans, I think, only they live on an island. They’ve taken the office space downstairs that the travel agency used to have.’

‘That’s nice dear.’

‘Yes. I’m going to have lunch with them, and if it seems like a good idea I might ask them over for dinner sometime, if you don’t mind.’

‘No, that’s fine, snooks. Whatever you like. It sounds interesting.’

‘Great, okay. I’m going to go meet them soon, I’ll tell you about it.’

‘Okay, good.’

‘Okay, bye dove.’

‘Bye love, talk to you.’

Charlie clicked off.

After ten giant breaths he stood, lifting Joe in his arms. Joe buried his face in Charlie’s neck. Shakily Charlie retraced their course. It was somewhere between fifty and a hundred yards. Rivulets of sweat ran down his ribs, and off his forehead into his eyes. He wiped them against Joe’s shirt. Joe was sweaty too. When he reached their stuff Charlie swung Joe around, down into his backpack. For once Joe did not resist. ‘Sowy Da,’ he said, and fell asleep as Charlie swung him onto his back.

Charlie took off walking. Joe’s head rested against his neck, a sensation that had always pleased him before. Sometimes he would even suckle the tendon there. Now it was like the touch of some meaning so great that he couldn’t bear it, a huge cloudy aura of danger and love. He started to cry, wiped his eyes and shook it off, as if shaking away a nightmare. Hostages to fortune, he thought. You get married, have kids, you give up such hostages to fortune. No avoiding it, no help for it. It’s just the price you pay for such love. His son was a complete maniac, and it only made him love him more.

He walked hard for most of an hour, through all the neighborhoods he had come to know so well in his years of lonely Mr Momhood. The vestiges of an older way of life lay under the trees like a network of ley lines: railway beds, canal systems, Indian trails, even deer trails, all could be discerned. Charlie walked them sightlessly. The ductile world drooped around him in the heat. Sweat lubricated his every move.

Slowly he regained his sense of normality. Just an ordinary day with Joe and Da.

The residential streets of Bethesda and Chevy Chase were in many ways quite beautiful. It had mostly to do with the immense trees, and the grass underfoot. Green everywhere. On a weekday afternoon like this there was almost no one to be seen. The slight hilliness was just right for walking. Tall old hardwoods gave some relief from the heat; above them the sky was an incandescent white. The trees were undoubtedly second or even third growth, there couldn’t be many old-growth hardwoods anywhere east of the Mississippi. Still they were old trees, and tall. Charlie had never shifted out of his California consciousness, in which open landscapes were the norm and the desire, so that on the one hand he found the omnipresent forest claustrophobic – he pined for a pineless view – while on the other hand it remained always exotic and compelling, even slightly ominous or spooky. The dapple of leaves at every level, from the ground to the highest canopy, was a perpetual revelation to him; nothing in his home ground or in his bookish sense of forests had prepared him for this vast and delicate venation of the air. On the other hand he longed for a view of distant mountains as if for oxygen itself. On this day especially he felt stifled and gasping.

His phone beeped again, and he pulled the earplugs out of his pocket and stuck them in his ears, clicked the set on.

‘Hello.’

‘Hey Charlie, I don’t want to bug you, but are you and Joe okay?’

‘Oh yeah, thanks Roy. Thanks for checking back in, I forgot to call you.’

‘So you found him.’

‘Yeah I found him, but I had to stop him running into traffic, and he was upset and I forgot to call back.’

‘Hey, that’s okay. It’s just that I was wondering, you know, if you could finish off this draft with me.’

‘I guess.’ Charlie sighed. ‘To tell the truth, Roy boy, I’m not so sure how well this work-at-home thing is going for me these days.’

‘Oh you’re doing fine. You’re Phil’s gold standard. But look, if now isn’t a good time …’

‘No no, Joe’s asleep on my back. It’s fine. I’m still just kind of freaked out.’

‘Sure, I can imagine. Listen we can do it later, although I must say we do need to get this thing staffed out soon or else Phil might get caught short. Dr Strangelove –’ this was their name for the President’s science advisor ‘– has been asking to see our draft too.’

‘I know, okay talk to me. I can tell you what I think anyway.’

So for a while as he walked he listened to Roy read sentences from his draft, and then discussed with him the whys and wherefores, and possible revisions. Roy had been Phil’s chief of staff ever since Wade Norton hit the road and became an advisor in absentia, and after years of staffing for the House Resources committee (called the Environment committee until the Gingrich Congress renamed it), he was deeply knowledgeable, and sharp too; one of Charlie’s favourite people. And Charlie himself was so steeped now in the climate bill that he could see it all in his head, indeed it helped him now just to hear it, without the print before him to distract him. As if someone were telling him a bedtime story.

Eventually, however, some question of Roy’s couldn’t be resolved without the text before him. ‘Sorry. I’ll call you back when I get home.’

‘Okay but don’t forget, we need to get this finished.’

‘I won’t.’

They clicked off.

His walk home took him south, down the west edge of the Bethesda Metro district, an urban neighbourhood of restaurants and apartment blocks, all ringing the hole in the ground out of which people and money fountained so prodigiously, changing everything: streets rerouted, neighbourhoods redeveloped, a whole clutch of skyscrapers bursting up through the canopy and establishing another purely urban zone in the endless hardwood forest.

He stopped in at Second Story Books, the biggest and best of the area’s several used bookstores. It was a matter of habit only; he had visited it so often with Joe asleep on his back that he had memorized the stock, and was reduced to checking the hidden books in the inner rows, or alphabetizing sections that he liked. No one in the supremely arrogant and slovenly shop cared what he did there. It was soothing in that sense.

Finally he gave up trying to pretend he felt normal, and walked past the auto dealer and home. There it was a tough call whether to take the baby backpack off and hope not to wake Joe prematurely, or just to keep him on his back and work from the bench he had put by his desk for this very purpose. The discomfort of Joe’s weight was more than compensated for by the quiet, and so as usual he kept Joe snoozing on his back.

When he had his material open, and had read up on tidal power generation cost/benefit figures from the UN study on same, he called Roy back, and they got the job finished. The revised draft was ready for Phil to review, and in a pinch could be shown to Senator Winston or Dr Strangelove.

‘Thanks Charlie. That looks good.’

‘I like it too. It’ll be interesting to see what Phil says about it. I wonder if we’re hanging him too far out there.’

‘I think he’ll be okay, but I wonder what Winston’s staff will say.’

‘They’ll have a cow.’

‘It’s true. They’re worse than Winston himself. A bunch of Sir Humphreys if I ever saw one.’

‘I don’t know, I think they’re just fundamentalist know-nothings.’

‘True, but we’ll show them.’

‘I hope.’

‘Charles my man, you’re sounding tired. I suppose the Joe is about to wake up.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Unrelenting eh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But you are the man, you are the greatest Mr Mom inside the Beltway!’

Charlie laughed. ‘And all that competition.’

Roy laughed too, pleased to be able to cheer Charlie up. ‘Well it’s an accomplishment anyway.’

‘That’s nice of you to say. Most people don’t notice. It’s just something weird that I do.’

‘Well that’s true too. But people don’t know what it entails.’

‘No they don’t. The only ones who know are real moms, but they don’t think I count.’

‘You’d think they’d be the ones who would.’

‘Well, in a way they’re right. There’s no reason me doing it should be anything special. It may just be me wanting some strokes. It’s turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. A real psychic shock.’

‘Because …’

‘Well, I was thirty-eight when Nick arrived, and I had been doing exactly what I wanted ever since I was eighteen. Twenty years of white male American freedom, just like what you have, young man, and then Nick arrived and suddenly I was at the command of a speechless mad tyrant. I mean, think about it. Tonight you can go wherever you want to, go out and have some fun, right?’

‘That’s right, I’m going to go to a party for some new folks at Brookings, supposed to be wild.’

‘All right, don’t rub it in. Because I’m going to be in the same room I’ve been in every night for the past seven years, more or less.’

‘So by now you’re used to it, right?’

‘Well, yes. That’s true. It was harder with Nick, when I could remember what freedom was.’

‘You have morphed into momhood.’

‘Yeah. But morphing hurts, baby, just like in The X-Men. I remember the first Mother’s Day after Nick was born, I was most deep into the shock of it, and Anna had to be away that day, maybe to visit her mom, I can’t remember, and I was trying to get Nick to take a bottle and he was refusing it as usual. And I suddenly realized I would never be free again for the whole rest of my life, but that as a non-Mom I was never going to get a day to honour my efforts, because Father’s Day is not what this stuff is about, and Nick was whipping his head around even though he was in desperate need of a bottle, and I freaked out, Roy. I freaked out and threw that bottle down.’

‘You threw it?’

‘Yeah, I slung it down and it hit at the wrong angle or something and just exploded. The baggie broke and the milk shot up and sprayed all over the room. I couldn’t believe one bottle could hold that much. Even now when I’m cleaning the living room I come across little white dots of dried milk here and there, like on the mantelpiece or the windowsill. Another little reminder of my Mother’s Day freak-out.’

‘Ha. The morph moment. Well Charlie, you are indeed a pathetic specimen of American manhood, yearning for your own Mother’s Day card, but just hang in there – only seventeen more years and you’ll be free again!’

‘Oh fuckyouverymuch! By then I won’t want to be.’

‘Even now you don’t wanna be. You love it, you know you do. But listen I gotta go Phil’s here bye.’

‘Bye.’

After talking with Charlie, Anna got absorbed in work in her usual manner, and might well have forgotten her lunch date with the people from Khembalung; but because this was a perpetual problem of hers, she had set her watch alarm for one o’clock, and when it beeped she saved and went downstairs. She could see through the front window that the new embassy’s staff was still unpacking, releasing visible clouds of dust or incense smoke into the air. The young monk she had spoken to and his most elderly companion sat on the floor inspecting a box containing necklaces and the like.

They noticed her and looked up curiously, then the younger one nodded, remembering her from the morning conversation after their ceremony.

‘Still interested in some pizza?’ Anna asked. ‘If pizza is okay?’

‘Oh yes,’ the young one said. The two men got to their feet, the old man in several distinct moves; one leg was stiff. ‘We love pizza.’ The old man nodded politely, glancing at his young assistant, who said something to him rapidly, in a language that while not guttural did seem mostly to be generated at the back of the mouth.

As they crossed the atrium to Pizzeria Uno Anna said uncertainly, ‘Do you eat pizza where you come from?’

The younger man smiled. ‘No. But in Nepal I have eaten pizza in tea houses.’

‘Are you vegetarian?’

‘No. Tibetan Buddhism has never been vegetarian. There were not enough vegetables.’

‘So you are Tibetans! But I thought you said you were an island nation?’

‘We are. But originally we came from Tibet. The old ones, like Rudra Cakrin here, left when the Chinese took over. The rest of us were born in India, or on Khembalung itself.’

‘I see.’

They entered the restaurant, where big booths were walled by high wooden partitions. The three of them sat in one, Anna across from the two men.

‘I am Drepung,’ the young man said, ‘and the rimpoche here, our ambassador to America, is Gyatso Sonam Rudra Cakrin.’

‘I’m Anna Quibler,’ Anna said, and shook hands with each of them. The men’s hands were heavily callused.

Their waiter appeared. She did not appear to notice the unusual garb of the men, but took their orders with sublime indifference. After a quick muttered consultation, Drepung asked Anna for suggestions, and in the end they ordered a combination pizza with everything on it.

Anna sipped her water. ‘Tell me more about Khembalung, and about your new embassy.’

Drepung nodded. ‘I wish Rudra Cakrin himself could tell you, but he is still taking his English lessons, I’m afraid. Apparently they are going very badly. In any case, you know that China invaded Tibet in 1950, and that the Dalai Lama escaped to India in 1959?’

‘Yes, that sounds familiar.’

‘Yes. And during those years, and ever since then too, many Tibetans have moved to India to get away from the Chinese, and closer to the Dalai Lama. India took us in very hospitably, but when the Chinese and Indian governments had their disagreement over their border in 1960, the situation became very awkward for India. They were already in a bad way with Pakistan, and a serious controversy with China would have been …’ He searched for the word, waggling a hand.

‘Too much?’ Anna suggested.

‘Yes. Much too much. So, the support India had been giving to the Tibetans in exile –’

Rudra Cakrin made a little hiss.

‘Small to begin with, although very helpful nevertheless,’ Drepung added, ‘shrank even further. It was requested that the Tibetan community in Dharamsala make itself as small and inconspicuous as possible. The Dalai Lama and his government did their best, and many Tibetans were relocated to other places in India, mostly in the far south. But elsewhere as well. Then some more years passed, and there were some, how shall I say, arguments or splits within the Tibetan exile community, too complicated to go into, I assure you. I can hardly understand them myself. But in the end a group called the Yellow Hat School took the offer of this island of ours, and moved there. This was just before the India – Pakistan war of 1970, unfortunately, so the timing was bad, and everything was on the hush-hush for a time. But the island was ours from that point, as a kind of protectorate of India, like Sikkim, only not so formally arranged.’

‘Is Khembalung the island’s original name?’

‘No. I do not think it had a name before. Most of our sect lived at one time or another in the valley of Khembalung. So that name was kept, and we have shifted away from the Dalai Lama’s government in Dharamsala, to a certain extent.’

At the sound of the words ‘Dalai Lama’ the old monk made a face and said something in Tibetan.

‘The Dalai Lama is still number one with us,’ Drepung clarified. ‘It is a matter of some religious controversies with his associates. A matter of how best to support him.’

Anna said, ‘I thought the mouth of the Ganges was in Bangladesh?’

‘Much of it is. But you must know that it is a very big delta, and the west side of it is in India. Part of Bengal. Many islands. The Sundarbans? You have not heard?’

Their pizzas arrived, and Drepung began talking between big bites. ‘Lightly populated islands, the Sundarbans. Some of them anyway. Ours was uninhabited.’

‘Did you say uninhabitable?’

‘No no. Inhabitable, obviously.’

Another noise from Rudra Cakrin.

‘People with lots of choices might say they were uninhabitable,’ Drepung went on. ‘And they may yet become so. They are best for tigers. But we have done well there. We have become like tigers. Over the years we have built a nice town. A little seaside potala for Gyatso Rudra and the other lamas. Schools, houses – hospital. All that. And sea walls. The whole island has been ringed by dykes. Lots of work. Hard labour.’ He nodded as if personally acquainted with this work. ‘Dutch advisors helped us. Very nice. Our home, you know? Khembalung has moved from age to age. But now …’ He waggled a hand again, took another slice of pizza, bit into it.

‘Global warming?’ Anna ventured.

He nodded, swallowed. ‘Our Dutch friends suggested that we establish an embassy here, to join their campaign to influence American policy in these matters.’

Anna quickly bit into her pizza, so that she would not reveal the thought that had struck her, that the Dutch must be desperate indeed if they had been reduced to help like this. She thought things over as she chewed. ‘So here you are,’ she said. ‘Have you been to America before?’

Drepung shook his head. ‘None of us have.’

‘It must be pretty overwhelming.’

He frowned at this word. ‘I have been to Calcutta.’

‘Oh I see.’

‘This is very different, of course.’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

She liked him: his musical Indian English, his round face and big liquid eyes, his ready smile. The two men made quite a contrast: Drepung young and tall, round-faced, with a kind of baby-fat look; Rudra Cakrin old, small and wizened, his face lined with a million wrinkles, his cheekbones and narrow jaw prominent in an angular, nearly fleshless face.

The wrinkles were laugh lines, however, combined with the lines of a wide-eyed expression of surprise that bunched up his forehead. Despite his noises and muttering under Drepung’s account, he still seemed cheerful enough. He certainly attacked his pizza with the same enthusiasm as his young assistant. With their shaved heads they shared a certain family resemblance.

She said, ‘I suppose going from Tibet to a tropical island must have been a bigger shock than coming from the island to here.’

‘I suppose. I was born in Khembalung myself, so I don’t know for sure. But the old ones like Rudra here, who made that very move, seem to have adjusted quite well. Just to have any kind of home is a blessing, I think you will find.’

Anna nodded. The two of them did project a certain calm. They sat in the booth as if there was no hurry to go anywhere else. Anna couldn’t imagine any such state of mind. She was always in a tearing hurry. She tried to match their air of being at ease. At ease in Arlington, Virginia, after a lifetime on an island in the Ganges. Well, the climate would be familiar. But everything else had to have changed quite stupendously.

And, on closer examination, there was a certain guardedness to them. Drepung glanced surreptitiously at their waiter; he looked at the pedestrians passing by; he watched Anna herself, all with a slightly cautious look, reminding her of the pained expression she had seen earlier in the day.

‘How is it that you came to rent a space in this particular building?’

Drepung paused and considered this question for a surprisingly long time. Rudra Cakrin asked him something and he replied, and Rudra said something more.

‘We had some advice there also,’ Drepung said. ‘The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has been helping us, and their office is located on Wilson Boulevard, nearby.’

‘I didn’t know that. They’ve helped you to meet people?’

‘Yes, with the Dutch, and with some island nations, like Fiji and Tuvalu.’

‘Tuvalu?’

‘A very small country in the Pacific. They have perhaps been less than helpful to the cause, telling people that sea level has risen in their area of the Pacific but not elsewhere, and asking for financial compensation for this from Australia and other countries.’

‘In their area of the Pacific only?’

‘Measurements have not confirmed the claim.’ Drepung smiled. ‘But I can assure you, if you are on a storm track and spring tides are upon you, it can seem like sea level has risen quite a great deal.’

‘I’m sure.’

Anna thought it over while she ate. It was good to know that they hadn’t just rented the first office they found vacant. Nevertheless, their effort in Washington looked to her to be underpowered at this point. ‘You should meet my husband,’ she said. ‘He works for a senator, one who is up on all these things, a very helpful guy, the chair of the foreign relations committee.’

‘Ah – Senator Chase?’

‘Yes. You know about him?’

‘He has visited Khembalung.’

‘Has he? Well, I’m not surprised, he’s been every – he’s been a lot of places. Anyway, my husband Charlie works for him as an environmental policy advisor. It would be good for you to talk to Charlie and get his perspective on your situation. He’ll be full of suggestions for things you could do.’

‘That would be an honour.’

‘I don’t know if I’d go that far. But useful.’

‘Useful, yes. Perhaps we could have you to dinner at our residence.’

‘Thank you, that would be nice. But we have two small boys and we’ve lost all our baby-sitters, so to tell the truth it would be easier if you and some of your colleagues came to our place. In fact I’ve already talked to Charlie about this, and he’s looking forward to meeting you. We live in Bethesda, just across the border from the District. It’s not far.’

‘Red line.’

‘Yes, very good. Red line, Bethesda stop. I can give you directions from there.’

She got out her calendar, checked the coming weeks. Very full, as always. ‘How about a week from Friday? On a Friday we’ll be able to relax a little.’

‘Thank you,’ Drepung said, ducking his head. He and Rudra Cakrin had an exchange in Tibetan. ‘That would be very kind. And on the full moon, too.’

‘Is it? I’m afraid I don’t keep track.’

‘We do. The tides, you see.’