Kim Stanley Robinson - Green Earth

He pulled out his phone and put it in his left ear. “Phone, call Roy.”

After a second: “Roy Anastophoulus.”

“Roy, it’s Charlie. I’m coming on in.”

“I’m not there.”

“Ah come on!”

“I know. When was the last time I actually saw you?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you going in for?”

“I need to talk to Phil. I had a dream this morning that I could convince anybody of anything, even Joe. I convinced Phil to reintroduce the Chinese aerosols bill, and then I got you to approve it.”

“That poison ivy has driven you barking mad.”

“Very true. It must be the steroids. I mean, the clouds today are like pulsing. They don’t know which way to go.”

“That’s probably right, there’s two low-pressure systems colliding here today, didn’t you hear?”

“How could I not.”

“They say it’s going to rain really hard.”

“Looks like I’ll beat it to the office, though.”

“Good. Hey listen, when Phil gets in, don’t be too hard on him. He already feels bad enough.”

“He does?”

“Well, no. Not really. I mean, when have you ever seen Phil feel bad about anything?”

“Never.”

“Right. But, you know. He would feel bad about this if he went in for that kind of thing. And you have to remember, he’s pretty canny at getting the most he can get from these bills. He sees the limits and then does what he can. It’s not a zero-sum game to him. He really doesn’t think of it as us-and-them.”

“But it is us-and-them.”

“True. But he takes the long view. Later some of the thems will be part of an us. And meanwhile, he finds some pretty good tricks. Breaking the superbill into parts might have been the way to go. We’ll get back a lot of this stuff later.”

“Maybe. We never tried the Chinese aerosols again.”

“Not yet.”

Charlie stopped listening to check the street he was crossing. When he started listening again Roy was saying, “So you dreamed you were Xenophon, eh?”

“How’s that?”

“Xenophon. He wrote the Anabasis, which tells the story of how he and a bunch of Greek mercenaries got stuck and had to fight their way across Turkey to get home to Greece. They argue the whole time about what to do, and Xenophon wins every argument, and all his plans always work perfectly. I think of it as the first great political fantasy novel. So who else did you convince?”

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