Fifty Degrees Below (53 page)

So Frank drove out the George Washington Parkway to the Beltway, Rudra peering out from the passenger seat with a lively eye, talking in Tibetan. Frank tried to identify what words he could, but it didn’t add up to much—
malam,
highway;
sgan,
hill;
sdon-po,
tree. It occurred to him that maybe this was what conversation always was, two people talking to themselves in different languages, mostly in order to clarify themselves to themselves. Or else just filling the silence, singing
ooop ooop.

He tried to resist this theory, so Edgardo-esque, by asking specific questions. “How old are you?”

“Eighty-one.”

“Where were you born?”

“Near Drepung.”

“Do you remember any of your past lives?”

“I remember many lives.”

“Lives before this life?”

Rudra looked down at the river as they crossed on the Beltway. “Yes.”

“Not interrupted by any deaths?”

“Many deaths.”

“Yes, but I mean, your own deaths?”

Rudra shrugged. “This does not seem to be the body I used to inhabit.”

Out on the farm, Rudra insisted on trudging slowly up to the land’s high point, a low ridge at the eastern edge of the property, just past the ruined farmhouse.

They looked around. “So you’ll make this your new Khembalung.”

“Same Khembalung,” Rudra said. “Khembalung is not a
place.
” He waved his arm at the scene. “A name for a way.” He wiggled his hand forward like a fish, as if indicating passage through time.

“A moveable feast,” Frank suggested.

“Yes. Milarepa said this, that Khembalung moves from age to age. He said it will go north. Not until now have we seen what he meant. But here it is.”

“But Washington isn’t very north of Khembalung.”

“From Khembalung go north, keep going, over top of world and down the other side. Here you are!”

Frank laughed. “So now this is Khembalung?”

Rudra nodded. He said something in Tibetan that Frank didn’t understand.

“What’s that?”

“The first Khembalung was recently found, north of Kunlun Mountains. Ruins located, recently, under desert mountain in Takla Makan.”

“They found the original? How old was the site?”

“Very old.”

“Yes, but did they say a date by chance?”

Rudra frowned. “Eighth century in your calendar?”

“Wow. I bet you’d like to go see that.”

Rudra shook his head. “Stones.”

“I see. You like this better.” Indicating the broad sweep of grass and mud under their gaze.

“Sure. More lively. Live living.”

“That’s true. So, a great circle route, and Shambhala comes to us.”

“Good way to put it.”

Slowly they walked down to the riverbank, a broad swath of mud curving around the ridge and then away to the southeast. The curve, Frank thought, might be another reason the land had been for sale. The natural snake-slither of riverine erosion would perhaps eat away this mud bank, and then the devastated grass above it. Possibly a well-placed wall could stabilize the bank at certain critical points. “I’ll have to ask General Wracke out for your homecoming party,” Frank said as he observed it. “He’ll have suggestions for a wall.”

“More dikes, very good idea.”

On their way back to the van they passed under a stand of trees, and Frank parked Rudra under one to take a quick survey of the grove. Two sycamores, a truly giant oak; even a stand of pines.

“This looks good,” he said to Rudra as he came walking back over the grass. “Those are really good trees, you could build in several of them.”

“Like your tree house.”

“Yes, but you could do it here. Bigger, and lower.”

“Good idea.”

Many remote underwater vehicles were cruising the North Atlantic, sending back data that quickly became front page news about the status of the stalled Gulf Stream. At the end of September a hurricane lashed Central America, dumping a great deal of rain in the Pacific, which would increase the salinity of the Gulf Stream further. All systems were go for the salt fleet now converging in the ocean west of Ireland; but in the meantime, with nothing more happening in the Atlantic, the news shifted its attention south, where the West Antarctic Ice Sheet continued to detach, in small but frequent icebergs at its new margin. The big fragment was adrift in the Antarctic Ocean, a tabular berg as big as Germany and thicker than any ice shelf had ever been, so that it had in fact raised sea level by several inches. Tuvalu was being evacuated; further ramifications of this event were almost too large to be grasped. Through October it remained just one more bit of bad news among the rest. Sea-level rise, oh my; but what could anyone do?

Frank sat in a room at NSF with Kenzo and Edgardo, looking at data in from NOAA. He had some ideas about sea-level-rise mitigation, in fact. But now the topic of the hour switched back to the International North Atlantic Current Mitigation Project. Data coming back from the RUVs, white whales, ships, and buoys scattered throughout the Atlantic were encouraging. It was becoming apparent, Kenzo said, that the predictions made by some that a stall in the thermohaline circulation would create negative feedbacks to its continuance had been correct. With the heat of the Gulf Stream not reaching the far North Atlantic, there had been a resulting southward movement of the Hadley circulation in the atmosphere; this meant a southerly shift in the Atlantic’s intertropical convergence zone. Normally the convergence zone was a high precipitation zone, and so with its shift south the rain had diminished in the midlatitudes where it used to fall, so that the salinity of the balked mass at the north end of the stall had been rising. Even the fresh-water cap north of Iceland was not as fresh as it had been back in the spring.

So conditions were ripe; everything was shaping up well for their intervention. The fleet of single-hulled VLCC tankers had been loaded at the many salt pans and ports around the Caribbean and North Africa that had been called upon, and they were almost all at the rendezvous point. The fleet headed north moving into formation, and the photos coming in over the internet were hard to believe, the sheer number of ships making it look like a sure artifact of Photoshopping.

Then the dispersal of the salt began, and the photos got even stranger. It was scheduled to last two weeks, the last of October and the first of November; and halfway through it, three days before the presidential election, Frank got a call from Diane.

“Hey, do you want to go out and see the salting in person?”

“You bet I do!”

“There’s an empty seat you can have, but you’ll have to get ready fast.”

“I’m ready now.”

“Good for you. Meet me at Dulles at nine.”

Ooooop! A voyage to the high North Atlantic, to see the salt fleet with Diane!

Their trip to Manhattan came to mind; and since then of course he and Diane had spent a million hours together, both at work and in the gym. So when they sat down that night in adjoining seats on Icelandic Air’s plane, and Diane put her head on his shoulder and fell asleep even before it took off, it felt very natural, like part of the rest of their interaction.

They came down on Reykjavik just before dawn. The surface of the sea lay around the black bulk of Iceland like a vast sheet of silver. By then Diane was awake; back in D.C. this was her usual waking hour, unearthly though that seemed to Frank, who had just gotten tired enough to lean his head on hers. These little intimacies were shaken off when the seatbacks returned to their upright position. Diane leaned across Frank to look out the window, Frank leaned back to let her see. Then they were landing, and out of the plane into the airport. Neither of them had checked luggage, and they weren’t there long before it was time to join a group of passengers trammed out to a big helicopter. On board, earplugs in, they rose slowly and then chuntered north over empty blue ocean.

The northern horizon grew hazy, and soon after that those passengers with a view were able to distinguish the tankers themselves, long and narrow, like Mississippi river barges in their proportions, but immensely bigger. The fleet was moving in a rough convoy formation, and as they flew north and slowly descended, there came a moment when the tankers dotted the ocean’s surface for as far as they could see in all directions, spread out like iron filings in a magnetic field, all pointing north. Lower still: black syringes, lined in rows on a blue table, ready to give their “long injections of pure oil.”

They dropped yet again, toward a big landing pad on a tanker called the
Hugo Chavez,
an Ultra Large Crude Carrier with a gigantic bridge at its stern. From this height the ships around them looked longer than ever, all plowing broad white wakes into a swell from the north that seemed miniature in proportion to the ships, but began to look substantial the lower they got. Hovering just over the
Hugo Chavez
’s landing pad, it became clear from the windcaps and spray that the salt armada was in fact crashing through high seas and a stiff wind, almost a gale. Looking in the direction of the sun the scene turned black-and-white, like one of those characteristically windblown chiaroscuro moments in
Victory At Sea.

When they got out of the helo the wind blasted through their clothes, and chased them upstairs to the bridge’s control quarters. There a crowd of visitors larger than the crew of the ship had a fine view over a broad expanse of ocean, crowded with immense ships all carrying salt.

Looking away from the sun the sea was a cobalt color, a deep and pure Adriatic blue, without any hint of the blackness that mysteriously seeped into both the polar seas.

The
Hugo Chavez,
seen from its bridge, looked like an aircraft carrier with the landing deck removed. The quarterdeck or sterncastle under the bridge was tall, but only a tiny part of the craft; the forecastle looked like it was a mile away. The intervening distance was interrupted by a skeletal rig that resembled a loading crane, but also reminded Frank of the giant irrigation sprayers one saw in California’s central valley. The salt in the hold was being vacuumed into this device, then cast out in powerful white jets, a couple hundred meters to both sides. The hardrock salt had been milled to sizes ranging from table salt to rock salt to bowling balls, but because most of it came from salt pans, it was mostly crystalline and pretty fine. In the holds it looked like dirty white gravel and sand. In the air it looked almost like dirty water or slush, arching out and splashing in a satisfyingly broad swath. Between the salt fall and the ship’s wakes, and the whitecaps, the deep blue of the ocean surface was infinitely mottled by white. Looking aft, in the direction of the sun, it turned to silver on pewter and lead.

Diane watched the scene with her nose almost on the glass, deeply hooded in a blue heavy jacket. She smiled at Frank. “You can smell the salt.”

“The ocean always smells like this.”

“It seems like more today.”

“Maybe so.” She had grown up in San Francisco, he remembered. “It must smell like home.” She nodded happily.

They followed their hosts up a metal staircase to a higher deck of the bridge, a room with windows on all sides that had a view like that from an airport control tower. It was this room that made the
Hugo Chavez
the designated visitor or party ship, and now the big glass-walled room was crowded with dignitaries and officials of all kinds. Here they could best view the long ships on all sides of them, all the way out to the horizon, where more ships were visible only at fore and stern, or by the white jets of salt. Each ship cast two long curving jets out to the sides from its bow, like the spouts of right whales; and every element was repeated so symmetrically that it seemed as if they had fallen into an M. C. Escher world.

The tankers flanking theirs seemed nearer than they really were because of their great size. They were completely steady in the long swells. The air around the ships was filled with a white haze that drifted down the wake for a kilometer or so before sinking away. Diane pointed out that the diesel exhaust stayed in the air while the salt mist did not. “They look so dirty. I wonder if we couldn’t go back to sails again someday, and just let everything go slower by sea.”

“Labor costs,” Frank suggested. “Uncertainty. Maybe even danger.”

“Would they be more dangerous? I bet you could make them so big and solid they wouldn’t be any more dangerous than these.”

“These were reckoned pretty dangerous.”

“I don’t hear of many accidents, given that there are thousands of them out all the time.”

They moved from one set of big windows to the next, taking in the views.

“It’s like the San Joaquin Valley,” Frank said. “There are these huge irrigation rigs that roll around spraying stuff.”

Diane nodded. “I wonder if this will work.”

“Me too. If it doesn’t . . .”

“I know. It would be hard to talk people into trying anything else.”

“True.”

Around and around the bridge they walked. Everyone else was doing the same, in a circulation like that at any other party. Blue sky, blue sea, the horizon ticked by tiny wavelets, as in a pattern on wallpaper; and then the fleet, each ship haloed by a wind-tossed cloud of white mist. Frank and Diane caught each other by the shoulder to point things out, just as they would have in Optimodal. A bird; a fin in the distance.

Then another group arrived in the room, and soon they were escorted to Diane: the Secretary-General of the UN, Germany’s environmental minister, who was the head of their Green Party and a friend of Diane’s from earlier times; lastly the prime minister of Great Britain, who had done a kind of Winston Churchill during their hard winter, and who now shook Diane’s hand and said, “So this
is
the face that launched a thousand ships,” looking very pleased with himself. Frank couldn’t be sure Diane caught the reference; she was already smiling, and distracted by the introduction of others in the new group. They all chatted as they circled the room, and after a while Diane and Frank stood in a big circle listening to the others, their upper arms just barely touching as they stood side by side.