Forty Signs of Rain (23 page)

He said, “Come on, Delphina. We went over all this when I helped to start Torrey Pines, and I haven’t forgotten. Faculty are allowed to spend up to twenty percent of work time on outside consulting. Whatever I make doing that is mine, it only has to be reported. So even if I did go back to Torrey Pines, what’s wrong with that? I wouldn’t be joining their board, and I wouldn’t use more than twenty percent of my time!”

“That’s good—”

“And most of it happens in my head anyway, so even if I
did
spend more time on it, how are you going to know? Are you going to read my mind?”

Delphina sighed. “Of course we can’t read your mind. In the end it’s
an honor system. Obviously. We ask people what’s going on when we see things in the financial reports, to remind them what the rules are.”

“I don’t appreciate the implications of that. Tell the oversight committee what the situation is on my stocks, and ask them to do their research properly before they bother people.”

“All right. Sorry about that.” She did not seem perturbed.

Frank went out for a walk around the campus. Usually this soothed him, but now he was too upset. Who had told the oversight committee that he was planning to rejoin Torrey Pines? And why? Would somebody at Torrey Pines have made a call? Only Derek knew for sure, and he wouldn’t do it.

But others must have heard about it. Or could have deduced his intention after his visit. That had been only a few days before, but enough time had passed for someone to make a call. Sam Houston, maybe, wanting to stay head science advisor?

Or Marta?

Disturbed at the thought, at all these machinations, he found himself wishing he were back in D.C. That was shocking, because when he was in D.C. he was always dying to return to San Diego, biding his time until his return, at which point his real life would recommence. But it was undeniable; here he was in San Diego, and he wanted to be in D.C. Something was wrong.

Part of it must have been the fact that he was not really back in his San Diego life, but only previewing it. He didn’t have a home, he was still on leave, his days were not quite full. That left him wandering a bit, as he was now. And that was unlike him.

Okay—what would he do with free time if he lived here?

He would go surfing.

Good idea. His possessions were stowed in a storage unit in the commercial snarl behind Encinitas, so he drove there and got his surfing gear, then returned to the parking lot at Cardiff Reef, at the south end of Cardiff-by-the-Sea. A few minutes’ observation while he pulled on his long-john wetsuit (getting too small for him) revealed that an ebb tide
and a south swell were combining for some good waves, breaking at the outermost reef. There was a little crowd of surfers and body-boarders out there.

Happy at the sight, Frank walked into the water, which was very cool for midsummer, just as they all said. It never got as warm as it used to. But it felt so good now that he ran out and dove through a broken wave, whooping as he emerged. He sat in the water and floated, pulled on his booties, velcroed the ankle strap of the board cord to him, then took off paddling. The ocean tasted like home.

The whole morning was good. Cardiff Reef was a very familiar break to him, and nothing had changed in all the years he had come here. He had often surfed here with Marta, but that had little to do with it. Although if he did run into her out here, it would be another chance to talk. Anyway the waves were eternal, and Cardiff Reef with its simple point break was like an old friend who always said the same things. He was home. This was what made San Diego his home—not the people or the jobs or the unaffordable houses, but this experience of being in the ocean, which for so many years of his youth had been the central experience of his life, everything else colorless by comparison, all the way up until he had discovered climbing.

As he paddled, caught waves and rode the lefts in long ecstatic seconds, and then worked to get back outside, he wondered again about this strangely powerful feeling of saltwater as home. There must be an evolutionary reason for such joy at being cast forward by a wave. Perhaps there was a part of the brain that predated the split with the aquatic mammals, some deep and fundamental part of mentation that craved the experience. Certainly the cerebellum conserved very ancient brain workings. On the other hand perhaps the moments of weightlessness, and the way one floated, mimicked the uterine months of life, which were then called back to mind when one swam. Or maybe it was a very sophisticated aesthetic response, an encounter with the sublime, as one was constantly falling and yet not dying or even getting hurt, so that the discrepancy in information between the danger signals and the comfort signals was experienced as a kind of triumph over reality.

Whatever; it was a lot of fun. And made him feel vastly better.

Then it was time to go. He took one last ride, and rather than kicking out when the fast part was over, rode the broken wave straight in toward the shore.

He lay in the shallows and let the hissing whitewater shove him around. Back and forth, ebb and flow. For a long time he lolled there. In his childhood and youth he had spent a fair bit of time at the end of every ocean session doing this, “grunioning” he called it; and he had often thought that no matter how much people worked to make more complicated sports in the ocean, grunioning was all you really needed. Now he splayed out and let the water wash him back and forth, feeling the sandy surges lift and push him. Grooming by ocean. As it ran back out to sea the water sifted the fine black flakes in the sand, mixing them into the rounded tan and white grains until they made networks of overlapping black V’s. Coursing patterns of nature—

“Are you okay?”

He jerked his head up. It was Marta, on her way out.

“Oh, hi. Yeah I’m okay.”

“What’s this, stalking me now?”

“No,” then realizing it might be a little bit true:
“No!”

He stared at her, getting angry. She stared back.

“I’m just catching some waves,” he said, mouth tight. “You’ve got no reason to say such a thing to me.”

“No? Then why did you ask me out yesterday?”

“A mistake, obviously. I thought it might do some good to talk.”

“Last year, maybe. But you didn’t want to then. You didn’t want to so much that you ran off to NSF instead. Now it’s too late. So just leave me alone, Frank.”

“I am!”

“Leave me alone.”

She turned and ran into the surf, diving onto her board and paddling hard. When she got out far enough she sat up on her board and balanced, looking outward.

Women in wetsuits looked funny, Frank thought as he watched her.
Not just the obvious, but also the subtler differences in body morphology were accentuated: the callipygosity, the shorter torso-to-leg ratio, the 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio—whatever it was, it was different, and it drew his eye like a magnet. He could tell the difference from as far away as he could see people at all. Every surfer could.

What did that mean? That he was in thrall to a woman who despised him? That he had messed up the main relationship of his life and his best chance so far for reproductive success? That sexual dimorphism was a powerful driver in the urge to reproduction? That he was a slave to his sperm, and an idiot?

All of the above.

His good mood shattered, he hauled himself to his feet. He stripped off the booties and long john, toweled off at his rental car, drove back up to his storage unit, and dropped off his gear. Returned to his hotel room, showered, checked out, and drove down the coast highway to the airport, feeling like an exile even while he was still here on his own home ground.

Something was deeply wrong.

He checked in the car, robotted through the routines to get him on his plane to Dallas. Sat in a window seat looking down at the view as the plane roared off. Point Loma, the ocean blue from up here, the waves breaking on the coast, perpetually renewing their white tapestry. Bank, turn, Mount Soledad, up through the cloud layer, fly up and east.

He fell asleep. By the time he woke up again they were descending into Dallas. It was strange to watch the process of falling toward the Earth, the buildings and cars like toys at first, quickly growing to real things that sped by. Then standing, disembarking into the big curves of the Dallas airport, on to its rail shuttle, over to another arc, to sit and wait for the plane to D.C.

Grimly he watched America walk by. Who were these people who could live so placidly while the world fell into an acute global environmental crisis? Experts at denial. Experts at filtering their information to hear only what made it seem sensible to behave as they behaved. Many of those walking by went to church on Sundays, believed in God, voted Republican,
spent their time shopping and watching TV. Obviously nice people. The world was doomed.

He settled in his next plane seat (on the aisle this time, because the view didn’t matter), feeling more and more disgusted and angry. NSF was part of it; they weren’t doing a thing to help. He got out his laptop, turned it on, and called up a new word processing file. He started to write.

The plane had started to descend.

Well, it would need a little revision. Mixed metaphors; something was either a chicken or an ostrich, even if in fact it was both. But he could work on it. He had a draft in hand, and he would revise it and then give it to Diane Chang, head of NSF, in the slim hope that it would wake her up.

He hit the
SAVE
button for the first time in about an hour. The plane turned for its final descent into Ronald Reagan Airport. Soon he would be back in the wasteland of his current life. Back in the swamp.

B
ACK IN Leo’s lab, they got busy running trials of Pierzinski’s algorithm, while continuing the ongoing experiments in “rapid hydrodynamic insertion,” as it was now called in the emerging literature. Many labs were working on the delivery problem and, crazy as it seemed, this was one of the more promising methods being investigated. A bad sign.

Thus they were so busy on both fronts that they didn’t notice at first the results that one of Marta’s collaborators was getting with Pierzinski’s method. Marta had done her Ph.D. studying the microbiology of certain algae, and she was still coauthoring papers with a postdoc named Eleanor Dufours. Leo had met Eleanor, and then read her papers, and been impressed. Now Marta had introduced Eleanor to a version of Pierzinski’s algorithm, and things were going well, Marta said. Leo thought his group might be able to learn some things from their work, so he set up a little brown-bag lunch for Eleanor to give a talk.

“What we’ve been looking into,” Eleanor said that day in her quiet steady voice, very unlike Marta’s, “is the algae in certain lichens. DNA histories are making it clear that some lichens are really ancient partnerships of algae and fungus, and we’ve been genetically altering the algae in one of the oldest,
Cornicularia cornuta
. It grows on trees, and works its way
into the trees to a quite suprising degree. We think the lichen is helping the trees it colonizes by taking over the tree’s hormone regulation and increasing the tree’s ability to absorb lignins through the growing season.”