Fifty Degrees Below (58 page)
“Good.”
Rudra considered it. “And yet you do not seem happy, my friend.”
“No. Well.” A deep, deep breath. “. . . I don’t know. I’m cold. I’m afraid we’re in for another bad winter, whether the salt works or not. I don’t think any of the feral animals left will make it if that happens.”
“You put out shelters?”
“Yes.” An image: “I was in one of those myself, when Drepung found me and brought me here.”
“You told me that.”
“It was filled with all kinds of different animals, all in there together.”
“That must have looked strange.”
“Yes. And they saw me, too. I sat right down by them. But they didn’t like it. They didn’t like me being there.”
Rudra shook his head regretfully. “No. The animals don’t love us anymore.”
“Well. You can see why.”
“Yes.”
They sat there, staring at the orange glow of the space heater.
Rudra said, “If winter is all that is troubling you, then you are okay, I think.”
“Ah well. I don’t know.”
The taste of blood. Frank gestured at his cell phone, put his cold hand back under his thigh, rocked forward and back, forward and back. Warm up, warm up. Don’t bleed inside. “There’s too many . . . different things going on at once. I go from thing to thing, you know. Hour to hour. I see people, I do different things with them, and I’m not . . . I don’t feel like the same person with these different people. I don’t know what I’m doing.
I don’t know what to do.
If anyone were watching they’d think I had some kind of mental disorder. I don’t make any sense.”
“But no one is watching.”
“Except what if they are?”
Rudra shook his head. “No one can see inside you. So no matter what they see, they don’t know. Everyone only judges themself.”
“That’s not good!” Frank said. “I need someone more generous than that!”
“Ha ha. You are funny.”
“I’m serious!”
“A good thing to know, then. You are the judge. A place to start.”
Frank shuddered, rubbed his face. Cold hands, cold face; and dead behind the nose. “I don’t see how I can. I’m so different in these different situations. It’s like living multiple lives. I mean I just act the parts. People believe me. But I don’t know what I feel. I don’t know what I mean.”
“Of course. This is always true. To some you are like this, to others like that. Sometimes a spirit comes down. Voices take over inside you. People take away what they see, they think that is all there is. And sometimes you want to fool them in just that way. But want to or not, you fool them. And they fool you! And on it goes—everyone in their own life, everyone fooling all the others—No! It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks for always generous help from:
Jürgen Atzgerstorfer, Terry Baier, Willa Baker, Guy Guthridge, George Hazelrigg, Charles Hess, Tim Highham, Neil Koehler, Rachel Park, Ann Russell, Tom St. Germain, Michael Schlesinger, Mark Schwartz, Jim Shea, Gary Snyder, Mark Thiemens, Buck Tilley, and Paul J. Werbos.
ALSO BY
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Fiction
The Mars Trilogy
Red Mars
Green Mars
Blue Mars
The California Trilogy
The Wild Shore
The Gold Coast
Pacific Edge
Escape from Kathmandu
A Short, Sharp Shock
Green Mars
(novella)
The Blind Geometer
The Memory of Whiteness
Icehenge
The Planet on the Table
Remaking History
Antarctica
The Martians
The Years of Rice and Salt
Forty Signs of Rain
Nonfiction
The Novels of Philip K. Dick
FIFTY DEGREES BELOW
A Bantam Spectra Book / November 2005
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2005 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robinson, Kim Stanley.
Fifty degrees below / Kim Stanley Robinson.
p. cm.
1. Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.O2893F54 2005
813′.54—dc22 2005048074
eISBN: 978-0-553-90207-5
v3.0