Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

Cumulative impacts, Anna thought with a sigh. That was one of the most complex and vexing subjects in her own world of biostatistics. And the Chinese problem was an exercise in macrobiostatistics. What Anna’s correspondent Fengzhen talked about in his e-mails was what he called a “general system crash,” and he spoke of indicator species already extinct, and other signs that such a crash might be in its early stages. It was a theory he was working on. He compared the Chinese river valleys’ situation to that of the coral reefs, which had all died in about five years.

Anna read this and swallowed hard. She wrote back asking if he and his colleagues could identify the worst two or three impacts they were seeing, their causes and possible mitigations, and clicked send with a sinking feeling. NSF had an international component wherein U.S. scientists teamed with foreign scientists on shared projects, and the infrastructure obtained for these grants remained for the use of the foreign teams when the grants were over. A good idea; but it didn’t look like it was going to be adequate for dealing with this one.

Early one Saturday morning, Charlie met Frank and Drepung on the Potomac, at the little dock by the boathouse at the mouth of Rock Creek, and they put their kayaks in the water just after dawn, the sun like an orange floating on the water. They stroked upstream on the Maryland side, looking into the trees to see if there were any animals still out. Then across the copper sheen to the Virginia side, to check out a strange concrete outfall there. “That’s where I used to bring Rudra Cakrin,” Frank said, pointing at the little overlook at Windy Run.

Then he stroked ahead, smooth and splashless. He was not much more talkative here than he had been in the Sierras, mostly looking around, paddling silently ahead.

On this morning, his habits suited Charlie’s purposes. Charlie slowed in Frank’s wake, and soon he and Drepung were a good distance behind, and working a little to keep up.

“Drepung?”

“Yes, Charlie?”

“I wanted to ask you something about Joe.”

“Yes?”

“Well…I’m wondering how you would characterize what’s going on in him now, after the…ceremony that you and Rudra conducted last year.”

Drepung’s brow furrowed over his sunglasses. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Well—some I don’t know, some sort of spirit was expelled?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Well,” Charlie said. He took a deep breath. “I want it to come back.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want my Joe back. I want whoever he was before the ceremony to come back. That’s the real Joe. I’ve come to realize that. I was wrong to ask you to do anything to him. Whatever he was before, that was him. You know?”

“I’m not sure. Are you saying that he’s changed?”

“Yes! Of course that’s what I’m saying! Because he has changed! And I didn’t realize…I didn’t know that it took all of him, even the parts that—that I don’t know, to make him what he is. I was being selfish, I guess, just because he was so much work. I rationalized that it wasn’t him and that it was making him unhappy, but it was him, and he wasn’t unhappy at all. It’s now that he seems kind of unhappy, actually. Or maybe just not himself. I mean he’s easier than before, but he doesn’t seem to be as interested in things. He doesn’t have the same spark. I mean…what was it that you drove out of him, anyway?”

Drepung stared at him for a few strokes of the paddle. Slowly he said, “People say that certain Bön spirits latch on to a person’s intrinsic nature, and are hard to dislodge with Buddhist ceremonies. The whole history of Buddhism coming to Tibet is one fight after another, trying to drive the Bön spirits out of the land and the people, so that Buddhist precepts and, you know, the nonviolence of Buddhism could take the upper hand. It was hard, and there were many contradictions involved, as usual if you try too hard to fight against violent feelings. That itself can quickly become another violence. Some of the earlier lamas had lots of anger themselves. So the struggle never really ended, I guess you would say.”

“Meaning there are still Bön spirits inhabiting you people?”

“Well, not everyone.”

“But some?”

“Yes, of course. Rudra was often pestered. He could not get rid of one of them. And he had invited them into him so many times, when serving as the oracle, it made him susceptible, you might say. Anyway this one would not leave him. This was one of the reasons he was so irritable in his old age.”

“I never thought he was that bad.” Charlie sighed. “So where is that Bön spirit now, eh? Is Rudra’s soul still having to deal with it in the bardo?”

“Possibly so. We cannot tell from here.”

“He’ll get reborn at some point, presumably.”

“At some point.”

“But so…Are there ceremonies to call spirits into you?”

“Sure. That’s what the oracle does, every time there is a visitation ceremony.”

“Ah ha. So listen, could you then call back the spirit that you exorcised from Joe? Could you explain it was a mistake, and invite him back?”

Drepung paddled on for a while. The silence lingered. Ahead of them Frank was now drifting into the shallows behind a snag.

“Drepung?”

“Yes, Charlie. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Drepung! Don’t give me that one!”

“No, I mean it. In this case, I think I know what you mean. And I have the right figure in mind. The one that was in Joe. A very energetic spirit.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“And I know the right ceremony too.”

“Oh good. Good. Well—let me know what I can do, then?”

“I will. I’ll have to talk to Sucandra about it, but he will help us. I will tell you when we have made the arrangements, and divined the right time for it.”

“The right time for what?” Frank asked, as they had caught up to him, or at least were within earshot. On the water that was often hard to determine.

“The right time to put Joe Quibler in touch with his spirit.”

“Ah ha! It’s always the right time for that, right?”

“To everything its proper moment.”

“Sure. Look—there’s one of the tapirs from the zoo, see there in that bush?”

“No?”

“There, it’s the same color as the leaves. An animal from South America. But I guess dead leaves are the same color everywhere. Anyway, it’s good to see, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. So how are the feral animals doing generally?”

“Okay. It all depends their natural range. Some species have been spotted seven hundred miles from the zoo, and up to thirty latitude lines out of their natural range. You must have heard Anna talking to Nick about this. She’s helping him and his group to make a habitat corridor map, networking all the remaining wildernesses together. It’s a GIS land-use thing.”

“So if we want it, we can have the animals back.”

“Yeah. We can. It would be cool if the president would back the forest and wilderness initiatives coming out of the animal rights community. Brother to Wolves kind of thing, you know.”

Charlie laughed. “He’s got a lot on his plate. I don’t know if he’s got time for that one right now. It’s a hard thing to get his attention these days.”

For Frank this was a new issue, but Charlie had been dealing with it for years, since long before Phil had become president. It simply was not easy to get any time with someone so powerful and busy. Now Charlie could see that Frank also was running into that limitation. Even though Diane was the presidential science advisor, ensconced in the Old Executive Offices and therefore able to walk over whenever called on to discuss things with the president and his people, she still did not see him very often. He was booked by the minute. No matter how sympathetic Andrea and Roy were to the scientists’ cause, there was very little presidential time available to give to meetings with them. On they had to go, flying in formation, and the days ripped away as in the calendar shots of old movies.