“Yeah. But morphing hurts, baby, just like in 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 honor 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.”

After talking with Charlie, Anna got absorbed in work as usual, and might well have forgotten her lunch date; but because this was a perpetual problem of hers, she had set her watch alarm, and when it beeped she saved and went downstairs. Down at the new embassy the young monk and his most elderly companion sat on the floor inspecting a box.

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 assistant, who said something in their language.

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 ate pizza in teahouses.”

“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.”

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 and after a quick muttered consultation, Drepung asked Anna for suggestions, and in the end they ordered a combination pizza.

Anna sipped her water. “Tell me about Khembalung.”

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 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 disagreed 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 too much. So, India 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, mostly to the far south. One group took the offer of an island in the Sundarbans, and moved there. 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 group lived at one time in the valley of Khembalung. So that name was kept, and we have shifted away from the Dalai Lama’s government in Dharamsala.”

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.”

“And your island?”

Their pizza arrived, and Drepung began talking between big bites. “Lightly populated, the Sundarbans. Ours was uninhabited.”

“Did you say uninhabitable?”

“People with lots of choices might say they were uninhabitable,” Drepung said. “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. Schools, houses, hospital. All that. And seawalls. The whole island has been ringed by dikes. Lots of work. Hard labor.” 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. “Sea level rise?”

He nodded, swallowed. “Our Dutch friends suggested that we establish an embassy here, to join their campaign to influence American policy.”

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 from these people. 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. He seemed cheerful, and 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 well. Just to have any kind of home is a blessing.”

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 watched Anna 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 to consider this question for a surprisingly long time. Rudra said something to him.

“We had some advice there,” Drepung said. “The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has been helping us, and their office is located nearby.”

Anna thought it over while she ate. It was good to know that they hadn’t just rented the first office they found. 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 interested in climate change, and a good guy, and 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.”

“That would be an honor.”

“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 babysitters, 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.”

She got out her calendar, checked the coming weeks. Very full, as always. “How about a week from Friday? On Fridays we 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.”

CHAPTER 3

INTELLECTUAL MERIT

Water flows through the oceans in steady recycling patterns, determined by the Coriolis force and the particular positions of the continents in our time. Surface currents can move in the opposite direction to bottom currents below them, and often do, forming systems like giant conveyor belts of water. The largest one is already famous, at least in part: the Gulf Stream is a segment of a warm surface current that flows north up the entire length of the Atlantic, all the way to Norway and Greenland. There the water cools and sinks, and begins a long journey south on the Atlantic Ocean floor, to the Cape of Good Hope and then east toward Australia, and even into the Pacific, where the water upwells and rejoins the surface flow, west to the Atlantic for the long haul north again. The round trip for any given water molecule takes about a thousand years.

Cooling salty water sinks more easily than fresh water. Trade winds sweep clouds generated in the Gulf of Mexico west over Central America to dump their rain in the Pacific, leaving the remaining water in the Atlantic that much saltier. So the cooling water in the North Atlantic sinks well, aiding the power of the Gulf Stream. If the surface of the North Atlantic were to become rapidly fresher, it would not sink so well when it cooled, and that could stall the conveyor belt. The Gulf Stream would have nowhere to go, and would slow down, and sink farther south. Weather everywhere would change, becoming windier and drier in the Northern Hemisphere, and colder in places, especially in Europe.

The sudden desalination of the North Atlantic might seem an unlikely occurrence, but it has happened before. At the end of the last Ice Age, for instance, vast shallow lakes were created by the melting of the polar ice cap. Eventually these lakes broke through their ice dams and poured off into the oceans. North America still sports scars from three or four of these cataclysmic floods; one flowed down the Mississippi, one the Hudson, one the St. Lawrence. These flows stalled the world ocean conveyor belt current, and the climate of the whole world changed as a result, sometimes in as little as three years.

Now, with Greenland’s ice cap melting fast, and the Arctic sea ice breaking into bergs, would enough fresh water flow into the North Atlantic to stall the Gulf Stream again?

Frank Vanderwal kept track of climate news as a sort of morbid hobby. His friend Kenzo Hayakawa, an old grad school housemate, had spent time at NOAA before coming to NSF to work with the weather crowd on the ninth floor, and so Frank occasionally checked in with him, to say hi and find out the latest. Things were getting wild out there; extreme weather events were touching down all over the world, the violent short-termed ones almost daily, the chronic problems piling one on the next, so that never were they entirely clear of them. The Hyperniño, severe drought in India and Peru, lightning fires in Malaysia; then on the daily scale, a typhoon destroying most of Mindanao, a snap freeze killing crops and breaking pipes all over Texas, and so on. Something every day.

Like a lot of climatologists and other weather people Frank had met, Kenzo presented all this news with a faintly proprietary air, as if he were curating the weather. He liked the wild stuff, and enjoyed sharing news of it, especially if it supported his theory that the heat humans had added to the atmosphere had been enough to change the monsoon patterns for good, triggering global repercussions; meaning almost everything. This week for instance it was tornadoes, previously confined almost entirely to North America as a kind of freak of that continent’s topography and latitude, but now appearing in East Africa and in Central Asia. Last week it had been the weakening of the Great World Ocean Current in the Indian Ocean rather than the Atlantic.

“Unbelievable,” Frank would say.

“I know. Isn’t it amazing?”

Before leaving for home at the end of the day, Frank often passed by another source of news, the little room filled with file cabinets and copy machines informally called “The Department of Unfortunate Statistics.” Someone had started to tape onto the walls of this room extra copies of pages that held interesting statistics or other bits of recent quantitative information. No one knew who had started the tradition, but now it was clearly a communal thing.

The oldest ones were headlines, things like:

WORLD BANK PRESIDENT SAYS FOUR BILLION LIVE ON LESS THAN TWO DOLLARS A DAY.

AMERICA: FIVE PERCENT OF WORLD POPULATION, SEVENTY PERCENT OF CORPORATE OWNERSHIP

Later pages were charts, or tables of figures out of journal articles, or short articles out of the scientific literature.

When Frank went by on this day, Edgardo was in there at the coffee machine, as he so often was, looking at the latest. It was another headline:

352 RICHEST PEOPLE OWN AS MUCH AS THE POOREST TWO BILLION, SAYS CANADIAN FOOD PROJECT

“I don’t think this can be right,” Edgardo declared.

“How so?” Frank said.

“The poorest two billion have nothing, whereas the richest three hundred and fifty-two have a big percentage of the world’s capital. I suspect it would take the poorest four billion at least to match the top three hundred and fifty.”

Anna came in as he was saying this, and wrinkled her nose as she went to the copying machine. She didn’t like this kind of conversation, Frank knew. It seemed to be a matter of distaste for belaboring the obvious. Or distrust in the data. Maybe she was the one who had taped up a brief quote: “72.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot.”

Frank, wanting to bug her, said, “What do you think, Anna?”

“About what?”

Edgardo pointed to the headline and explained his objection.

Anna said, “I don’t know. Seven magnitudes is a lot. Maybe if you add two billion small households up, it matches the richest three hundred.”

“Not this top three hundred. Have you seen the latest Forbes 500?”

Anna shook her head impatiently, as if to say, Of course not, why would I waste my time? But Edgardo was an inveterate student of the stock market and the financial world generally. He tapped another page. “The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.”

Anna said, “I wonder how they define surplus value.”

“Profit,” Frank said.

Edgardo shook his head. “You can cook the books and get rid of profit, but the surplus value, the value created above and beyond the pay for the labor, is still there.”

Anna said, “There was a page in here that said the average American worker puts in 1,950 hours a year. I thought that was questionable too, that’s forty hours a week for about forty-nine weeks.”

“Three weeks of vacation a year,” Frank pointed out. “Pretty normal.”

“Yeah, but average? What about all the part-time workers?”

“There must be an equivalent number of people who work overtime.”

“Can that be true? I thought overtime was a thing of the past.”

“You work overtime.”

“Yeah but I don’t get paid for it!”

The men laughed at her.

“They should have used the median,” she said. “The average is a skewed measure of central tendency. Anyway, that’s”—Anna could do calculations in her head—“sixty-four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value. If you can believe these figures.”

“What’s the average income?” Edgardo asked. “Thirty thousand?”

“Maybe less,” Frank said.

“We don’t have any idea,” Anna objected.

“Call it thirty, and what’s the average taxes paid?”

“About ten? Or is it less?”

Edgardo said, “Call it ten. So let’s see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two-thirds of that and gives you one third, then you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it gets to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his much larger share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party.” He grinned at Frank and Anna. “How stupid is that?”

Anna shook her head. “People don’t see it that way.”

“But here are the statistics!”

“People don’t usually put them together like that. Besides, you made half of them up.”

“They’re close enough for people to get the idea! But they are not taught to think! In fact they’re taught not to think. And they are stupid to begin with.”

Even Frank was not willing to go this far. “It’s a matter of what you can see,” he suggested. “You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it’s given to you. You have it. Then you’re forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you’ve created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books.”

“But the rich are all over the news! Everyone can see they have more than they have earned, because no one really earns that much.”

“The only things people understand are sensory,” Frank insisted. “We’re hardwired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts like surplus value, or statistics on the value of a year’s work, these just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Edgardo said cheerfully. “We are stupid!”

“I’ve got to get back to it,” Anna said, and left. It really wasn’t her kind of conversation.

Frank followed her out, and finally headed home. He drove his little fuel-cell Honda out Old Dominion Parkway, already jammed; over the Beltway, and then up to a condo complex called Swink’s New Mill, where he had rented a condominium for his year at NSF.

He parked in the complex’s cellar garage and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. His apartment looked out toward the Potomac—a long view and a nice apartment, rented to Frank for the year by a young State Department guy who was doing a stint in Brasília. It was furnished in a stripped-down style that suggested the man did not live there very often. But a nice kitchen, functional spaces, everything easy, and most of the time Frank was there he was asleep, so he didn’t care what it was like.

He had picked up one of the free papers back at work, and now he looked at the Personals section, a regrettable habit he had had for years, fascinated as he was by this glimpse into a subworld of radically efflorescing sexual diversity. Were people like this really out there, or were these merely the fantasies of a bunch of lonely souls like himself? The sections devoted to people looking for LTRs, meaning “long-term relationships,” sometimes struck him with force. ISO LTR: in search of long-term relationship. The species had evolved toward monogamy, it was wired into the brain. Not a cultural imposition, but a biological instinct. They might as well be storks.

And so he read the ads, but never replied. He was only here for a year. It made no sense to take any action on this front. The ads themselves also tended to stop him.

Husband hunting, SWF, licensed nurse, seeks a hardworking, handsome SWM for LTR. Must be a dedicated Jehovah’s Witness.

SBM, 5'5", shy, quiet, a little bit serious, seeking Woman, age open. Not good-looking or wealthy but Nice Guy. Enjoy foreign movies, opera, theater, music, books, quiet evenings.

These were not going to get a lot of responses. Frank could have written their ur-text, and one time he had, and had even sent it in, as a joke of course—it would make some of them laugh. And if any woman liked the joke well enough to call, well, that would have been a sign.

Male Homo sapiens desires company of female Homo sapiens for mutual talk and grooming behaviors, possibly mating and reproduction. Must be happy, run fast.

But no one had replied.

He went out onto the bas-relief balcony, into the sultry late afternoon. Another two months and he would be going home, back to his real life. Thinking about that reminded him of the grant application from Yann Pierzinski. He went inside to his laptop and googled Yann to try to learn more about what he had been up to. Then he reopened the application. Recursion at the boundary limit … it was interesting.

Finally he called up Derek Gaspar at Torrey Pines Generique.

“What’s up?” Derek said after the preliminaries.

“Well, I just got a grant proposal from one of your people, and I’m wondering if you can tell me anything about it.”

“From one of mine, what do you mean?”

“A Yann Pierzinski, do you know him?”

“No, never heard of him. He works here you say?”

“He was there on a temporary contract, working with Simpson. He’s a postdoc from Caltech.”

“Ah yeah, here we go. Mathematician, got a paper in Biomathematics on algorithms.”

“Yeah, that comes up first on my Google too.”

“Well sure. I can’t be expected to know everyone who ever worked with us here, that’s hundreds of people, you know that.”

“Sure sure.”

“So what’s his proposal about? Are you going to give him a grant?”