Off to the Belly-Up. Into the giant Quonset, loud and hot. Dance dance dance. Don’t take any pills from Marta. Eleanor was a good dancer, and she and Marta bopped together as a team. She had an arm tattoo which Frank saw clearly for the first time: a Medusa head with its serpentine hair and glare, and a circle of script around it; above it read Nolo mi tangere, below, Don’t Fuck With Me. Yann disappeared, Eleanor and Marta danced near Frank, occasionally turning to him for a brief pas-de-troix, hip-bumping, tummy-bumping, chest-bumping, oh yes. Easy to do when you had eaten the antidote!
Then off into the night. A pattern already. The habit was formed with the second iteration. Frank drove to his storage locker and then out to the coast highway and south to Black’s, remembering the wild ride with the horrible hard-on. So much for Marta. He laid out his bed on the cliff in his old nook. He sat there slowly falling asleep. Maybe the third good correlation was the simultaneous development of the proteomics algorithm with the targeted insertion delivery. It was the best night’s sleep he had had in months.
H IS FLIGHT OUT THE NEXT DAY left in the afternoon, so the next morning he went back to his locker to stash his night gear and pick up his water stuff, then drove to the department office on campus to finish all his business there.
When he was done he gave Leo a call. “Hey Leo, when Derek was on the hunt right before Torrey Pines got sold, did you ever go out and do the dog and pony with him?”
“Yeah I did, a few times.”
“Did you ever meet anyone interesting in that process?”
“Well, let me think…. That was a pretty crazy time.” After a long pause he said, “There was a guy we met near the end, a venture capitalist named Henry Bannet. He had an office in La Jolla. He asked some good questions. He knew what he was talking about, and he was, I don’t know. Intense.”
“Do you remember the name of his firm?”
“No, but I can google him.”
“True. But I can do that too.”
Frank thanked him and got off, then googled Henry Bannet and got a list in 2.3 seconds. The one on the website for a firm called Biocal seemed right. A couple more taps and the receptionist at Biocal was answering the phone. She put him through, and no more than fifteen seconds after he had started his hunt, he was talking to the man himself, cell phone to cell phone it sounded like.
Frank explained who he was and why he was calling, and Bannet agreed to look into the matter, and meet with him next time he was in town.
After that Frank put his bathing suit and fins in his daypack and walked down to La Jolla Farms Road, and then down the old asphalt road to Black’s Beach.
Being under its giant sandstone cliff gave Black’s a particular feel. Change into bathing suit, out into the swell, “Oooooop! Oooooop!” Fins tugged on and out he swam, tasting the old salt taste as he went. Mother Ocean, salty and cool. The swell was small and from the south. There weren’t any well-defined breaks at Black’s, but shifting sandbars about a hundred yards offshore broke up the incoming waves, especially when the swell was from the south. Presumably the great cliff itself provided the sand for the sandbars, as it did for the beach, which was much wider than most of North County’s beaches these days, even Del Mar’s.
Outside it was classic Black’s. Swells reared up suddenly, hollowed slowly, broke with sharp clean reports. Long slow lefts, short fast rights. Frank swam and rode, swam and rode, swam and rode. It was like knowing how to ride a bicycle—no thinking to it, once you got back into it. What had Emerson said about surfing? All human life was like this.
On the beach a young couple had just arrived. The guy had on long flowing white pants and a long-sleeved white shirt, also a wide-brimmed white hat, and a long yellow scarf or burnoose wrapped high around his neck. He even had on white gloves. Some issues with sun, it appeared, and what Frank could see of his face was albino pink. His companion was twirling around him in ecstatic circles, swinging her long black hair around and pulling off her clothes—shirt over her head and thrown at him, pants pulled off and handed to him. She danced around him naked, arms extended, then dashed out into the surf.
Well, that was Black’s Beach for you. Frank stroked out and caught another wave, singing Spencer’s song about the VW van: I would fight for hippie chicks, I would die for hippie chicks. Inshore the woman dove into the broken waves while her companion stood knee deep, watching her impassively. An odd couple—
But weren’t they all!
After that, it was on to Asia. First a flight up to Seattle, then a long shot to Beijing. Frank slept as much as he could, then got some views of the Aleutians seen through clouds, followed by a pass over the snowy volcano-studded ranges of Kamchatka.
The Beijing meeting, called Carbon Expo Asia, was interesting. It was both a trade show and a conference on carbon emissions markets, sponsored by the International Emissions Trading Association, and among those speaking were governmental representatives involved in establishing and regulating them. Carbon, of course, was a commodity with a futures market (as Frank himself had been, and maybe still was). With Phil Chase in office, the world had assumed the U.S. would be joining the global carbon cap and trade market, dragging Australia and the other recalcitrants in their AP6 with it, and so the value of carbon emissions on the carbon futures market had soared. All countries would set caps and then the trading would be fully globalized, and in theory trading and prices would take off. Now, however, the futures traders were beginning to wonder if carbon might become so sharply capped, or the burning of it become so old-tech, that emissions would be abandoned outright and lose all value in a market collapse. So there were countervailing pressures coming to bear on the daily price and its prognosis, as in any futures market. Discussions at this very meeting had caused the price on the European market to rise a few euros, to 22 euros a share.
All these pressures were on display here for Frank to witness. Naturally Chinese traders were especially prominent, and behind them the Chinese government appeared to be calling the shots. They were trying to bump the present value of emissions futures, the local American trade representative explained to Frank, by holding China’s potential coal burning over everyone else’s head, as a kind of giant environmental terrorist threat. By threatening to burn their coal they hoped to create all kinds of concessions, and essentially get their next generation of power plants paid for by the rest of the global community. Or so went the threat. Thus the Chinese bureaucrats wandered the conference halls looking fat and dangerous, as if explosives were strapped to their waists, implying with their looks and their cryptic comments that if their requirements were not met they would explode their carbon and cook the world.
The United States meanwhile still had the biggest carbon burn ongoing, and from time to time in the negotiations could threaten to claim that it was proving harder to cut back than they had thought. So all the big players had their cards, and in a way it was a case of mutual assured destruction all over again. Everyone had to agree on the need to act, or it wouldn’t work for any of them. So all the carbon traders and diplomats were in the halls dealing, the Americans as much as anyone. Indeed they, as the newcomers to the table, seemed the ones most desperate for a global deal. It was like a giant game of chicken. And in a game of chicken everyone thought the Chinese would win. They were bloody-minded hardball players in general, and only ten or a dozen guys there had to hold their nerve, rather than three hundred million; that was an eight-magnitude difference, and should be enough to guarantee China could hold firm the longest. If you believed the theory that the few were stronger in will than the many.
It was an interesting test of America’s true strength, now that Frank thought of it that way. Did the bulk of the world’s capital still reside in the U.S.? Did the U.S.’s military strength matter at all in this other world of energy technology? Was it a case of dominance without hegemony, as some were describing it, so that in the absence of a war, America was nothing but one more decrepit empire, falling by history’s wayside?
If America stopped burning 25 percent of the total carbon burned every year, would this make the country geopolitically stronger or weaker? One would have to find a perspective to measure situations which took into account many disparate factors that were not usually calculated together. It was a geopolitical mess to rival the end of World War II, and the delicate negotiations establishing the UN.
Then the meeting was over, with lots of emissions trading done, but little accomplished toward the global treaty that would replace Kyoto, and which hopefully would limit very sharply the total annual amount of emissions allowed for the whole world. That was becoming the usual way with these meetings, the American rep told Frank wearily at the end. Once you were making what could be called progress (meaning another way to make money, it seemed to Frank), no one was inclined to push for anything more radical.
Frank then caught a Chinese flight down to the Takla Makan desert, in far western China—a turbulent couple of hours—and landed at Khotan, an oasis town on the southern edge of the Tarim Basin. There he was loaded with some Hungarian civil engineers into a minibus and driven north, to the shores of the new salt sea. Throughout the drive plumes of dust, as if from a volcanic explosion, rose in the sky ahead of them. As they approached, the yellow wall of rising dust became more transparent, and finally was revealed as the work of a line of gigantic bulldozers, heaving a dike into place on an otherwise empty desert floor. It looked like the Great Wall was being reproduced at a magnitude larger scale.
Frank got out at a settlement of tents, yurts, mobile homes, and cinder block structures, all next to an ancient dusty tumbledown of brown brick walls. He was greeted there by a Chinese-American archeologist named Eric Chung, with whom he had exchanged e-mails.
Chung took him by jeep around the old site. The actual dig occupied only a little corner of it. The ruins covered about a thousand acres, Chung told him, and so far they had excavated ten.
Everything in sight, from horizon to horizon, was a shade of brown: the Kunlun Mountains rising to the south, the plains, the bricks of the ruin, and in a slightly lighter shade, the newly exposed bricks of the dig.
“So this was Shambhala?” Frank said.
“That’s right.”
“In what sense, exactly?”
“That was what the Tibetans called it while it existed. That arroyo and wash you see down the slope was a tributary of the Tarim River, and it ran all year round, because the climate was wetter and the snow pack on the Kunluns was thicker, and there were glaciers. They’re saying that flooding the Tarim Basin may bring glaciers back again, by the way, so that this river would run again, which is one of the reasons we have to get the dig at the lower points done fast. Anyway, it was a very advanced city, the center of the kingdom of Khocho. Powerful and prominent in that time. It was located on a precursor of the Silk Road, and existed on trade and so on. A very rich culture. So the Bön people in Tibet considered it to be the land of milk and honey, and when the Buddhist monasteries took over up there, they developed a legend that this was a magical city, and Guru Rimpoche started the Shambhala motif in their iconography. It reminds me of the Atlantis myth, in that Plato wrote a thousand years after the explosion at Thera, but still described certain aspects of the Minoan colony on the island pretty well, especially the circular shape of the island. In this case the time lag is about the same, and Shambhala was always described in the literature as being square, with the corners at the four cardinal points, and surrounded by water. What we’re finding here are irrigation ditches that leave the riverbed upstream from the site, and circle it and rejoin the river downstream. And the city is platted in a square that is oriented north-south-east-west. So it fits the pattern, it has the name, it’s the right period. So, that’s the sense in which we call it Shambhala.”
“Wow. So it’s like finding Troy, or Thera.”
“Yes, exactly. A very exciting find. And the Chinese so far are being pretty good about it. The dike holding in this part of the new sea has been rerouted to keep the site out of the water. And between the site and the new lake it looks like they are hoping to create a new tourist destination, linked to the Tibet tour. We’re already seeing some Shangri-La hotels and travel companies springing up out here.”
“Amazing,” Frank said. “I wonder if it will catch on.”
“Who knows? But at least we won’t have to hurry to excavate a site that’s going to be drowned. I did that in Turkey, and it’s a terrible experience.”
Frank walked around the site with the man. “How old is it, did you say?”
“Eighth century.”
“And was it founded by a Rudra Cakrin?”
“Yes, that’s right. Very good.”
“But I read that he founded the city in sixteen thousand BC?”
“Yes,” Chung said, laughing, “they do say that, but it’s the same with Plato saying Atlantis was ten thousand years old and a hundred miles across. These stories appear to get exaggerated by a factor of ten.”
“Interesting.” They walked past a big cleared area of the dig. “This was a temple site?”
“Yes, we think so.”
Frank took from his daypack a pill bottle containing some of Rudra’s ashes that Qang had given him. He opened it and cast the fine gray ash into the wind. The little cloud puffed and drifted away onto the ground, more dust to add to all the rest. Maybe it would skew some numbers if they ever did any carbon-14 dating.
“Enough,” Frank said.
An Aeroflot flight then, during which he caught sight of the Aral Sea, which apparently was already twice as big as before its own flooding project had begun, thus almost back to the size it had been before people began diverting its inflow a century before. All kinds of landscape-restoration experiments were being conducted by the Kazakhs and Uzbeks around the new shoreline, which they had set legally in advance and which now was almost achieved. From the air the shoreline appeared as a ring of green, then brown, around a lake that was light brown near the shoreline, shading to olive, then a murky dark green, then blue. It looked like a vernal pool.
Later the plane landed and woke Frank with a cacophony of creaks and groans. Frank got off and was greeted by an American and Russian team from Marta and Yann’s old company, Small Delivery Systems. It was cold, and there was a dusting of dirty snow on the ground. Winter in Siberia! Although in fact it was not that cold and seemed rather dry and brown.
They drove off in a caravan of four long gray vans or tall station wagons, something like Soviet Land Rovers, it seemed, creaky like the plane, but warm and stuffy. People were starting to drive them on the frozen rivers again, he was told. Now they progressed over a road that was not paved but did have fresh pea gravel spread over it, and a coating of frost. The vehicles had to keep a certain distance from each other to avoid having their windshields quickly pitted.
Not far from the airport the road led them into a forest of scrubby pines. It looked like Interstate 95 in Maine, except that the road was narrower, and unpaved, and the trees therefore grayed by the dust thrown up by passing traffic. They were somewhere near Cheylabinsk 56, someone said. You don’t want to go there, a Russian added. One of Stalin’s biggest messes. Somewhere southeast of the Urals, Frank saw on a cell-phone map.
Their little caravan stopped in a clearing that included a gravel parking lot and a row of cabins. They got out, and the locals led the rest of them to a broad path leading into the woods. Quickly Frank saw that the roadside dust and frost had obscured the fact that all the trees in this forest had another coating: not dust, but lichen.
It was Small Delivery Systems’ lichen. Frank saw now why Marta had been not exactly boasting, nor abashed, nor exuberant, nor defensive, but some strange mixture of all these. Because she and Eleanor were the team that had engineered this tree lichen for the Russians, manipulating the fungal part of the symbiote so that it would colonize its host trees more quickly, and then alter the lignin balance of the trees in ways that changed their metabolism. Tree lichens had alw
ays done that to their hosts for their own purposes, but these did it faster and to a greater extent. The more lignin that got banked in the tree, the better the lichen did, but also the bulkier the root system became, and this increased the net carbon drawdown of individual trees by 7 or 10 percent. Cumulatively, a very big potential drawdown indeed.
And the lichen were obviously doing well, to the point where a balance had clearly been lost. There were forests Frank had seen in Canada where moss or lichen covered most of the trunks and branches. In particular he recalled a frondy, day-glo green moss that in places was very widespread. But this lichen plated everything: trunk, branches, twigs—everything but the pine needles themselves.
Such a thorough cloaking looked harmful. A shaft of sunlight cut through the clouds at an angle and hit some trees nearby, and their cladding of lichen made them gleam like bronze trees with their needles painted green.
The Small Delivery people out there with Frank were sanguine about all this. They did not think there would be a problem. They said the trees were not in danger. They said that even if some trees died, it would only be a bit of negative feedback to counter the carbon drawdown that was already working so well. If a certain percentage of trees also took on lignin so fast they split their trunks, or had roots rupture underground, or others were suffocated by the lichen growing over the budding points of the new needles, then that would slow any further runaway growth of the lichen. Things would then eventually reach a balance.
Frank wasn’t so sure. He did not think this was ecologically sound. Possibly the lichen could go on living on dead trees; certainly it could spread at the borders of the infestation to new trees. But these were not the people to talk to about this possibility.
The new lichen started out khaki, it appeared, and then caked itself with a second layer that was the dull bronze that eventually dominated. Like the cructose lichen of the high Sierra that you saw everywhere on granite, it was quite beautiful. The little bubbles of its surface texture had an insectile sheen. That was the fungus. Frank recalled a passage in Thoreau: “The simplest and most lumpish fungus has a peculiar interest to us, because it is so obviously organic and related to ourselves; matter not dormant, but inspired, a life akin to my own. It is a successful poem in its kind.”