Green Earth

They headed for the travel agency, and for a second Anna wondered if they had come to book a flight home. But then she saw that the travel agency’s windows were empty. In the doorway the Tibetanesque performers were now massing, in a crescendo of chant and brassy brass, the incredibly low notes vibrating the air. In the midst of the celebrants stood an old man, his brown face a maze of deep wrinkles. He smiled, raised his right hand, and the music came to a ragged end in a hyperbass note that fluttered Anna’s stomach.

The old man stepped free of the group and bowed to the four directions. He dipped his chin and sang, his voice splitting into two notes, with a resonant head tone distinctly audible over the clear bass, all very surprising coming out of such a slight man. Singing thus, he walked to the doorway of the travel agency and touched the doorjambs on each side, exclaiming something sharp each time.

“Rig yal ba! Chos min gon pa!”

The others all exclaimed, “Jetsun Gyatso!”

The old man bowed to them.

And then they all cried, “Om!” and filed into the little office space, the brassmen angling their long horns to make it in the door.

A young monk came back out. He took a small rectangular card from the loose sleeve of his robe, pulled some protective backing from it, and affixed it to the window next to the door. Then he retreated inside.

Anna approached the window. The little sign said

EMBASSY OF KHEMBALUNG

An embassy! And from a country she had never heard of. This was a strange place for an embassy, very far from Massachusetts Avenue’s ambassadorial stretch of unlikely architecture, unfamiliar flags, and expensive landscaping; far from Georgetown, Dupont Circle, Adams Morgan, Foggy Bottom, east Capitol Hill, or any of the other likely haunts for locating a respectable embassy. Not just in Arlington, but in the NSF building no less!

Maybe it was a scientific country.

Pleased at the thought, Anna approached closer still.

The young man who had put out the sign reappeared. He had a round face, a shaved head, and a quick little mouth, like Betty Boop’s.

His expressive black eyes met hers. “Can I help you?” he said, in what sounded to her almost like an Indian accent.

“Yes,” Anna said. “I saw your arrival ceremony, and I was wondering where you all come from.”

“Thank you for your interest,” the youth said politely, ducking his head and smiling. “We are from Khembalung.”

“Yes, but …”

“Ah. Our country is an island nation, in the Bay of Bengal, near the mouth of the Ganges.”

“I see,” Anna said, surprised; she had thought they would be from somewhere in the Himalayas. “I hadn’t heard of it.”

“It is not a big island. Nation status has been a recent development, you could say. Only now are we establishing a representation.”

“Good idea. Although, to tell the truth, I’m surprised to see an embassy in here. I didn’t think of this as being the right kind of space.”

“We chose it very carefully,” the young monk said.

They regarded each other.

“Well,” Anna said, “very interesting. Good luck moving in. I’m glad you’re here.”

“Thank you.” Again he nodded.

As Anna turned to go, something caused her to look back. The young monk still stood there in the doorway, looking across at the pizza place, his face marked by a tiny grimace of distress.

Anna recognized the expression. After her older son Nick was born she had shared the care of him with Charlie and some babysitters, and eventually they had taken him to a daycare center in Bethesda, near the Metro. At first Nick had cried furiously whenever she left, which she found excruciating; but then he had seemed to get used to it. And so did she, adjusting as everyone must to the small pains of the daily departure. It was just the way it was.

Then one day she had taken Nick down to the daycare center, and he didn’t cry when she said good-bye, didn’t even seem to care or to notice. But for some reason she had paused to look back in the window of the place, and there on his face she saw a look of unhappy, stoical determination—determination not to cry, determination to get through another long lonely boring day—a look that on the face of a toddler was heartbreaking. It had pierced her like an arrow. She had cried out involuntarily, even started to rush back inside to take him in her arms and comfort him. Then she reconsidered how another good-bye would affect him, and with a horrible wrenching feeling, a sort of despair at all the world, she had left.

Now here was that very same look, on the face of this young man! Anna stopped in her tracks, feeling again that stab from years before. Who knew what had caused these people to come halfway around the world? Who knew what they had left behind?

She walked back over to him.

He saw her coming, composed his features. “Yes?”

“If you want,” she said, “later on, when it’s convenient, I could show you some of the good lunch spots in this neighborhood.”

“Why, thank you,” he said. “That would be most kind.”

“Is there a particular day that would be good?”

“Well—we will be getting hungry today,” he said, and smiled. He had a sweet smile, not unlike Nick’s.

She smiled too, feeling pleased. “I’ll come back at one, if you like.”

“That would be most welcome. Very kind.”

She nodded. “At one, then,” already recalibrating her work schedule for the day. The boxed sandwich could be stored in her office’s little refrigerator.

With that Anna went to the south elevators. Waiting there she was joined by Frank Vanderwal, one of her program officers. They greeted each other, and she said, “Hey, I’ve got an interesting jacket for you.”

He mock-rolled his eyes. “Is there any such thing for a burnt-out case like me?”

“Oh I think so.” She gestured back at the atrium. “Did you see our new neighbor? We lost the travel agency but gained an embassy.”

“An embassy, here?”

“I’m not sure they know much about Washington.”

“Ah.” Frank grinned his crooked grin, very different than the young monk’s sweet smile. “Ambassadors from Shangri-La, eh?” One of the UP arrows lit, and the elevator door under it opened. “Well, we can use them.”

Primates in elevators. People stood in silence looking up at the lit numbers on the display console, as per custom.

Again the experience caused Frank Vanderwal to contemplate the nature of their species, in his usual sociobiologist’s mode. They were mammals, social primates: a kind of hairless chimp. Their bodies, brains, minds, and societies had grown to their current state in East Africa over a period of about two million years, while the climate was shifting and forest was giving way to savannah.

Much was explained by this. Naturally they were distressed to be trapped in a small moving box. No savannah experience could be compared to it. The closest analog might have been crawling into a cave, no doubt behind a shaman carrying a torch, everyone filled with great awe and very possibly under the influence of psychotropic drugs and religious rituals. An earthquake during such a visit to the underworld would be about all the savannah mind could contrive as an explanation for a modern trip in an elevator car. No wonder an uneasy silence reigned; they were in the presence of the sacred. And the last ten thousand years of civilization had not been anywhere near enough time for any evolutionary adaptations to alter these mental reactions. They were still only good at the things they had been good at on the savannah.

Anna Quibler broke the taboo on speech, as people would when all the fellow passengers were cohorts. She said to Frank, continuing her story, “I went over and introduced myself. They’re from an island in the Bay of Bengal.”

“Did they say why they rented the space here?”

“They said they had picked it very carefully.”

“Using what criteria?”

“I didn’t ask. On the face of it, you’d have to say proximity to NSF.”

Frank snorted. “That’s like the joke about the starlet and the Hollywood writer, isn’t it?”

Anna wrinkled her nose at this, surprising Frank; although she was proper, she was not prudish. Then he got it: her disapproval was not at the joke, but at the idea that these new arrivals would be that hapless. She said, “I think they’ll be interesting to have here.”

Homo sapiens is a species that exhibits sexual dimorphism. It’s more than a matter of bodies; the archeological record seemed to Frank to support the notion that the social roles of the two sexes had deviated early on. These differing roles could have led to differing thought processes, such that it would be possible to characterize plausibly the existence of unlike approaches even to ostensibly non-gender-differentiated activities, such as science. So that there could be a male practice of science and a female practice of science, in other words, and these could be substantially different activities.

These thoughts flitted through Frank’s mind as their elevator ride ended and he and Anna walked down the hall to their offices. Anna was as tall as he was, with a nice figure, but the dimorphism differentiating them was in their habits of mind and their scientific practice, and that might explain why he was a bit uncomfortable with her. Not that this was a full characterization of his attitude, but she did science in a way that he found annoying. It was not a matter of her being warm and fuzzy, as you might expect from the usual characterizations of feminine thought—on the contrary, Anna’s scientific work (she still often coauthored papers in statistics, despite her bureaucratic load) often displayed a finicky perfectionism that made her a very meticulous scientist, a first-rate statistician—smart, quick, competent in a range of fields and really excellent in more than one. As good a scientist as one could find for the rather odd job of running the Bioinformatics Division at NSF.

But she was so intense about it. A kind of Puritan of science, rational to an extreme. And yet of course that was all a front, as with the early Puritans; the hyperrational coexisted in her with all the emotional openness, intensity, and variability that was the American female interactional paradigm and social role. Every female scientist was therefore a kind of Mr. Spock, the rational side foregrounded and emphasized while the emotional side was denied.

On the other hand, judged on that basis, Frank had to admit that Anna seemed less split-natured than many women scientists he had known. Pretty well integrated, really. He had spent many hours of the past year working with her, engaged in interesting discussions, and he liked her. His discomfort came not from any of her irritating habits, not even the nitpicking or hairsplitting that made her so strikingly eponymous (though no one dared joke about that to her); no, it was more the way her hyperscientific attitude combined with her passionate female expressiveness to suggest a complete science, or even a complete humanity. It reminded Frank of himself!

Not of the self that he allowed others to see, of course, but rather of his internal life as he alone experienced it. He too was stuffed with extreme aspects of both rationality and emotionality. This was what made him uncomfortable: Anna was too much like him. She reminded him of things about himself he did not want to think about. But he was helpless to stop his trains of thought. That was one of his problems.

Halfway around the circumference of the sixth floor, they came to their offices. Frank’s was one of a number of cubicles carving up a larger space; Anna’s was a true office right across from his cubicle, a room of her own, with a foyer for her secretary, Aleesha. Both their spaces, and all the others in the maze of crannies and rooms, were filled with the computers, file cabinets, and crammed bookshelves that one found in scientific offices everywhere. The decor was standard beige for everything, indicating the purity of science.

In this case it was all rendered human, and even handsome, by the big windows on the interior sides of every room, allowing everyone to look across the central atrium and into all the other offices. This open space, and the sight of fifty to a hundred other humans, made each office a slice or echo of the savannah. The occupants were correspondingly more comfortable at the primate level. Frank did not suffer the illusion that anyone had consciously planned this effect, but he admired the architect’s instinctive grasp of what would get the best work out of the building’s occupants.

He sat down at his desk, gazed out across the atrium. He was near the end of his year-long stay at NSF, and the workload was becoming less and less important to him. Piles of articles lay in stacks on every horizontal surface, and his computer contained hundreds of proposals for his evaluation. He had a lot of work to do. Instead he looked out the window.

The colorful mobile filling the upper half of the atrium was a painfully simple thing, basic shapes in primary colors, very like a kindergartner’s scribble. Frank’s many activities included rock climbing, and often he had occupied his mind by imagining the moves he would need to climb the mobile. There were some hard sections, but it would make for a fun route.

Past the mobile, he could see into one hundred and eight other rooms (he had counted). In them people typed at screens, talked in couples or on the phone, read, or sat in seminar rooms looking at photos on screens, or talking. Mostly talking. If this place were all you had to go on, you would have to conclude that doing science consisted mostly of talking.

This was not even close to true, and it was one of the reasons Frank was bored. The real action of science took place in laboratories, or anywhere else experiments were being conducted. What happened here was different, a kind of meta-science, one might say, which coordinated scientific activities, or connected them to other human action, or funded them.

The smell of Anna’s latte wafted in from her office next door, and he could hear her on the phone already. She too did a lot of talking on the phone. “I don’t know, I have no idea what the other sample sizes are like … No, not statistically insignificant, that would mean the numbers were smaller than the margin of error. What you’re talking about is just statistically meaningless.”

Meanwhile Aleesha, her assistant, was on her phone as well, patiently explaining something in her rich D.C. contralto. Unraveling some misunderstanding. It was an obvious if seldom-acknowledged fact that much of NSF’s daily business got done by African-American women from the area, who often seemed decidedly unconvinced of the earth-shattering importance that their mostly Caucasian employers attributed to the work. Aleesha, for instance, displayed the most skeptical politeness Frank had ever heard.

Anna appeared in the doorway, tapping on the doorjamb as she always did, to pretend that his space was an office. “Frank, I forwarded that jacket to you, the one about an algorithm.”

“Let’s see if it arrived.” He checked, and up came a new one from [e-mail]. He loved that address. “It’s here, I’ll take a look at it.”

“Thanks.” She hesitated. “When are you due to go back to UCSD?”

“End of July or end of August.”

“Well, I’ll be sorry to see you go. I know it’s nice out there, but we’d love it if you’d consider putting in a second year, or even think about staying permanently, if you like it. Of course you must have a lot of irons in the fire.”

“Yes,” Frank said noncommittally. Staying longer than his one-year stint was completely out of the question. “That’s nice of you to ask. I’ve enjoyed it, but I should probably get back home. I’ll think about it, though.”

“Thanks. It would be good to have you here.”

Much of the work at NSF was done by visiting scientists, who came on leave from their home institutions to run NSF programs in their area of expertise for periods of a year or two. The grant proposals came pouring in by the thousands, and program directors like Frank read them, sorted them, convened panels of outside experts, and ran the meetings in which these experts rated batches of proposals in particular fields. This was a major manifestation of the peer-review process, a process Frank thoroughly approved of—in principle. But a year of it was enough, actually far more than enough.

Anna, watching him, said, “I suppose it’s a bit of a rat race.”

“Well, no more than anywhere else. At home it’d probably be worse.”

They laughed.

“And you have your journal work too.”

“That’s right.” Frank waved at the piles of typescripts: three stacks for Review of Bioinformatics, two for The Journal of Sociobiology. “Always behind. Luckily the other editors are better at keeping up.”

Anna nodded. Editing a journal was an honor, though unpaid—indeed one often had to subscribe to a journal just to get copies of what one had edited. It was another of science’s many noncompensated activities, part of its extensive economy of social credit.

“Okay,” Anna said. “I just wanted to see if we could tempt you. That’s how we do it, you know. When visitors come through who are particularly good, we try to hold on to them.”

“Yes, of course.” Frank nodded uncomfortably. Touched despite himself; he valued her opinion. He rolled his chair toward his screen as if to get to work, and she turned and left.

He clicked to the jacket Anna had forwarded. Immediately he recognized one of the investigators’ names.

“Hey Anna?” he called out.

“Yes?”

“I know one of the guys on this jacket. The P.I. is a guy from Caltech, but the real work is by one of his students.”

“Yes?” This was a typical situation, a younger scientist using the prestige of his or her advisor to advance a project.

“Well, I know the student. I was the outside member on his dissertation committee, a few years ago.”

“That wouldn’t be enough to be a conflict.”

Frank nodded as he read on. “But he’s also been working on a temporary contract at Torrey Pines Generique, which is a company in San Diego that I helped start.”

“Ah. Do you still have any financial stake in it?”

“No. Well, my stocks are in a blind trust for the year I’m here, so I can’t be positive, but I don’t think so.”

“But you’re not on the board, or a consultant?”

“No. And it looks like his contract there is about over now.”

“That’s fine, then. Go for it.”

No part of the scientific community could afford to be too picky about conflicts of interest, or they’d never find anyone to peer-review anything. Hyperspecialization made every field so small that everyone knew everyone. So as long as there were no current financial or institutional ties with a person, it was considered okay to evaluate their work in the various peer reviews.

But Frank had wanted to make sure. Yann Pierzinski was a very sharp young biomathematician, one of those doctoral students whom one watched with the certainty one would hear from them again. Now here he was, and with something Frank was particularly interested in.

“Okay,” he said to Anna. “I’ll put it in the hopper.”

He began to read it. “Algorithmic Analysis of Palindromic Codons as Predictors of a Gene’s Protein Expression.” A proposal to fund continuing work on an algorithm for predicting which proteins any given gene would express.

Very interesting. This was an assault on one of the fundamental mysteries, a mystery that presented a considerable blockage to any robust biotechnology. The three billion base pairs of the human genome encoded some hundred thousand genes; most of the genes contained instructions for the assembly of one or more proteins, the basic building blocks of organic chemistry and life itself. But which genes expressed which proteins, and how exactly they did it, and why some genes created different proteins in different circumstances—all this was very poorly understood, or completely mysterious. This ignorance made most biotechnology an endless, very expensive matter of trial-and-error. A key to any part of the mystery could be very valuable. As in lucrative.

Frank scrolled down the pages of the proposal with practiced speed. Yann Pierzinski, Ph.D. biomath, Caltech. Still doing a postdoc with his advisor there, who was a real credit hog. Interesting to see that Pierzinski had gone down to Torrey Pines to work on a temporary contract, for a bioinformatics researcher whom Frank didn’t know. Perhaps that had been a bid to escape the advisor.

Frank dug into the substance of the proposal. The algorithm was one Pierzinski had been working on even back in his dissertation. The chemistry of protein creation was a sort of natural algorithm, Yann was suggesting. Frank considered the idea operation by operation; this was his real expertise, this was what had interested him from childhood, when the puzzles he solved had been simple ciphers. He had always loved this work, and now perhaps more than ever, offering as it did a complete escape from consciousness of himself. Why he might want to make that escape remained moot; howsoever it might be, when he came back he felt refreshed, as if finally he had been in a good place.

He also liked to see patterns emerge from the apparent randomness of the world. This was why he had recently taken such an interest in sociobiology; he had hoped there might be algorithms to be found there which would crack the code of human behavior. So far that quest had not succeeded, as so little in human behavior was susceptible to controlled experiments, which meant that theories could not be tested. That was a shame. He badly wanted clarification in that realm.

At the level of the four chemicals of the genome, however—in the long dance of cytosine, adenine, guanine, and thymine—much more seemed to be amenable to mathematical explanation, also experiment, with results that could be conveyed to other scientists, and put to use. One could test Pierzinski’s ideas, in other words, and find out if they worked.

He came out of this trance hungry. He felt quite sure there was some real potential in the work. And that was giving him ideas, strange ideas in some respects, and yet …

He got up stiffly. It was midafternoon already. If he left soon he would be able to hack through the traffic out to Great Falls. By then the day’s heat would have subsided, and the gorge walls would be nearly empty. He could climb till sunset, and do some more thinking about this algorithm, in the only place in the D.C. area left with a touch of nature to it.

CHAPTER 2

IN THE HYPERPOWER

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 an aspect of the world, its structure or recipe.

Over historical time humanity has explored farther and farther 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 math and logic, with 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. Within half a century the whole genome was read, base pair by base pair. Three billion base pairs, forming the genes that serve as instruction packets for protein creation.