Forty Signs of Rain (21 page)

She surveyed him. “I don’t think so. I don’t think that would be a good idea. We might as well not even go there. What would be the point.”

“I don’t know, I’m interested to know how you’re doing I guess is all.”

“Yeah I know, I know what you mean. But sometimes there are things you’re interested in that you can’t really ever get to know anymore, you know?”

“Ah yeah.”

He pursed his lips, looked at her. She looked good. She was both the strongest and the wildest woman he had ever met. Somehow things between them had gone wrong anyway.

Now he looked at her and understood what she was saying. He was
never going to be able to know what her life was like these days. He was biased, she was biased; the scanty data would be inescapably flawed. Talking for a couple hours would not make any difference. So it was pointless to try. Would only bring up bad things from the past. Maybe in another ten years. Maybe never.

Marta must have seen something of this train of thought in his face, because with an impatient nod she turned and was gone.

A
FEW DAYS after Frank dropped by, Leo turned on his computer when he came in to the lab and saw there was an e-mail from Derek. He opened and read it, then the attachment that had come with it. When he was done he printed it all out, and forwarded it to Brian and Marta. When Marta came in about an hour later she had already done some work on it.

“Hey Brian,” she called from Leo’s door, “come check this out. Derek has sent us a new paper from that Yann Pierzinski who was here. He was funny. It’s a new version of the stuff he was working on when he was here. That was interesting I thought. If we could get it to find us better matching ligands, you might not need the hydrodynamic pressures to get them to stick in the body.”

Brian had come in while she was telling him this, and she pointed to parts of the diagram on Leo’s screen as he caught up. “See what I mean?” Liver cells, endothelial cells—all the cells in the body had receptor ligands that were extremely specific for the ligands on the particular proteins that they needed to obtain from the blood; together they formed something like lock-and-key arrangements, coded by the genes and embodied in the proteins. In effect they were locksmithing at the microscopic level, working with living cells as their material.

“Well, yeah. It would be great. If it worked. Maybe crunch them through this program over and over, until you see repeats. If you did … then test the ones with the ligands that fit best and look strongest chemically.”

“And Pierzinski is back to work on it with us!”

“Is he?”

“Yeah, he’s coming back. Derek says in his e-mail that we’ll have him at our disposal.”

“Cool.”

Leo checked this in the company’s directory. “Yep, here he is. Rehired just this week. Frank Vanderwal came by and mentioned this guy, he must have told Derek about it I bet. He was asking me about it too. Well, Vanderwal should know, this is his field.”

“It’s my field too,” Marta said sharply.

“Right, of course, I’m just saying Frank might have, you know. Well, let’s ask Yann to look at what we’ve got. If it works …”

Brian said, “Sure. It’s worth trying anyway. Pretty interesting.” He Googled Yann, and Leo leaned over his shoulder to look at the list.

“Derek obviously wants us to talk to him right away.”

“He must have rehired him for us.”

“I see that. So let’s get him before he gets busy with something else. A lot of labs could use another biomathematician.”

“True, but there aren’t a lot of labs. I think we’ll get him. Look, what do you think Derek means here, ‘write up the possibilities right away.’ ”

“I suppose he wants to get started using the idea to try to secure more funding.”

“Shit. Yeah, that’s probably right. Unbelievable. Okay, let’s pass on that for now, and give Yann a call.”

Their talk with Yann Pierzinski was indeed interesting. He breezed into the lab just a few days later, as friendly as ever, and happy to be back at Torrey Pines with a permanent job. He was going to be based in George’s math group, he told them, but had already been told by Derek
to expect to work a lot with Leo’s lab; so he arrived curious and ready to go.

Leo enjoyed seeing him again. Yann still had a tendency to become a speed-talker when excited, and he still canted his head to the side when thinking, as if to flood that half of his brain with blood, in just the kind of “rapid hydrodynamic forcing” that they were trying to get away from in their work (and he tilted it to the right, so was giving the boost to the so-called intuitive side, Leo noted). His algorithm sets were still works in progress, he said, and underdeveloped precisely in the gene grammars that Leo and Marta and Brian needed from him for their work; but all that was okay, because they could help him, and he was there to help them. They could collaborate, and when it came right down to it, Yann was a powerful thinker, and good to have on the case. Leo felt secure in his own lab abilities, devising and running experiments and the like, but when it came to the curious mixture of math, symbolic logic, and computer programming that these biomathematicians dove into—mathematicizing human logic, among other things, and reducing it to mechanical steps that could be scripted into the computers—he was way out of his depth. So Leo was happy to watch Yann sit down and plug his laptop into their desktop.

In the days that followed, they tried his algorithms out on the genes of their HDL factory cells, Yann substituting different procedures in the last steps of his operations, then checking what they got in the computer simulations, and selecting some for their dish trials. Pretty soon they found one version of the operation that was consistently good at predicting proteins that matched well with their target cells—making keys for their locks, in effect. “That’s what I’ve been focusing on for the past
year,”
Yann said happily after one such success.

As they worked, Pierzinski told them some of how he had gotten to that point in his work, following aspects of his advisor’s work at Caltech and the like. Marta and Brian asked him where he had hoped to take it all, in terms of applications. Yann shrugged; not much of anywhere, he told them. He thought the main interest of the operation was what it revealed about the mathematics of codon function. Just finding out more about
the mathematics of how genes became organisms. He had not thought much about the implications for clinical or therapeutic applications, though he freely acknowledged they might be there. “It stands to reason that the more you know about this, the more you’ll be able to see what’s going on.” The rest of it was not his field of interest. It was a classic mathematician thing.

“But Yann, don’t you see what the applications of this could be?”

“I guess. I’m not really interested in pharmacology.”

Leo and Brian and Marta stood there staring at him. Despite his earlier stint there, they didn’t know him very well. He seemed normal enough in most ways, aware of the outside world and so on. To an extent.

Leo said “Look, let us take you out to lunch. I want to tell you more about what all this could help us with.”

T
HE LOBBYING firm of Branson and Ananda occupied offices off Pennsylvania Avenue, near the intersection of Indiana and C Streets, about halfway between the White House and the Capitol, and overlooking the Marketplace. It was a very nice office.

Charlie’s friend Sridar met them at the front door. First he took them in to meet old Branson himself, then led them into a meeting room dominated by a long table under a window that gave a view of early summer leaves on gnarly branches. Sridar got the Khembalis seated, then offered them coffee or tea; they all took tea. Charlie stood near the door, flexing his knees and bobbing mildly about, keeping Joe asleep on his back, ready to make a quick escape if he had to.

Drepung spoke for the Khembalis, although Sucandra and Padma also pitched in with questions from time to time. They all consulted with Rudra Cakrin, who asked them a lot of questions in Tibetan. Charlie began to think he had been wrong about the old man understanding English; it was too cumbersome to be a trick, just as Anna had said.

All the Khembalis stared intently at Sridar or Charlie whenever they spoke. They made for a very attentive audience. They definitely had a presence. It had gotten to the point where Charlie felt that their Calcutta cottons, maroon vests, and sandals were normal, and that it was the
room itself that was rather strange, so smooth and spotlessly gray. Suddenly it looked to him like the inside of a Gymboree crawl space.

“So you’ve been a sovereign country since 1960?” Sridar was saying.

“The relationship with India is a little more … complicated than that. We have had sovereignty in the sense you suggest since about 1993.” Drepung rehearsed the history of Khembalung, while Sridar asked questions and took notes.

“So—fifteen feet above sea level at high tide,” Sridar said at the end of this recital. “Listen, one thing I have to say at the start—we are not going to be able to promise you anything much in the way of results on this global warming thing. That’s been given up on by Congress—” He glanced at Charlie: “Sorry, Charlie. Maybe not so much given up on as swept under the rug.”

Charlie glowered despite himself. “Not by Senator Chase or anyone else who’s really paying attention to the world. And we’re still working on it, we’ve got a big bill coming up and—”

“Yes yes, of course,” Sridar said, holding up a hand to stop him before he got into rant mode. “You’re doing what you can. But let’s put it this way—there are quite a few members of Congress who think of it as being too late to do anything.”

“Better late than never!” Charlie insisted, almost waking Joe.

“We understand,” Drepung said to Sridar, after a glance at the old man. “We won’t have any unrealistic expectations of you. We only hope to engage help that is experienced in the procedures used, the usual protocols you see. We ourselves will be responsible for the content of our appeals to the reluctant bodies, trusting you to arrange the meetings with them.”

Sridar kept his face blank, but Charlie knew what he was thinking. Sridar said, “We do our best to give our clients all the benefits of our expertise. I’m just reminding you that we are not miracle workers.”

The Khembalis nodded.

“The miracles will be our department,” Drepung said, face as blank as Sridar’s.

Charlie thought, these two jokers might get along fine.

Slowly they worked out what they would expect from one another, and Sridar wrote down the details of an agreement. The Khembalis were happy to have him write up what in essence was their request for a proposal. “That sure makes it easier,” Sridar remarked. “A clever way to make me write you a fair deal.” During this part of the negotiation (for such it was) Joe finished waking up, so Charlie left them to it.

Later that day Sridar gave Charlie a call. Charlie was sitting on a bench in Dupont Circle, feeding Joe a bottle and watching two of the local chess hustlers practice on each other. They played too fast for Charlie to follow the game.

“Look, Charlie, this is a bit ingrown, since you put me in touch with these guys, but really it’s your man that the lamas ought to be meeting first, or at least early on. The Foreign Relations Committee is one of the main ones we’ll have to work on, so it all begins with Chase. Can you set us up with a good chunk of the senator’s quality time?”

“I can with some lead time,” Charlie said, glancing at Phil’s master calendar on his wrist screen. “How about next Thursday, he’s had a cancellation?”

“Is that late morning, so he’s at his best?”

“He’s always at his best.”

“Yeah right.”

“No I’m serious. You don’t know Phil.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Thursday at? …”

“Ten to ten-twenty.”

“Perfect.”

Charlie could have made a good case for the energy of Senator Phil Chase being more or less invariant, and always very high. Here in the latter part of his third term he had fully settled into Washington, and his seniority was such that he had become very powerful, and very busy. He was constantly on the go, with every hour from six
A.M
. to midnight scheduled in twenty-minute units. It was hard to understand how he could keep his easy demeanor and relaxed ways.

Almost too relaxed. He did not sweat the details on most topics. He was a delegating senator, a hands-off senator. As many of the best of them were. Some senators tried to learn everything, and burned out; others knew almost nothing, and were in effect living campaign posters. Phil was somewhere in the middle. He used his staff well—as an exterior memory bank, if nothing else, but often for much more—for advice, for policy, even occasionally for their accumulated wisdom.

His longevity in office, and the strict code of succession that both parties obeyed, had now landed him the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and a seat on Environment and Public Works. These were A-list committees, and the stakes were high. The Democrats had come out of the recent election with a one-vote advantage in the Senate, a two-vote disadvantage in the House, and the President was still a Republican. This was in the ongoing American tradition of electing as close to a perfect gridlock of power in Washington as possible, presumably in the hope that nothing further would happen and history would freeze for good. An impossible quest, like building a card house in a gale, but it made for tight politics and good theater. Inside the Beltway it was considered to be an invigorating thing.

In any case, Phil was now very busy with important matters, and heading toward re-election time himself. His old chief of staff Wade Norton was on the road now, and though Phil valued Wade’s advice and kept him on staff as a telecommuting general advisor, Andrea had taken over the executive staff duties, and Charlie the environmental research, though he too was a part-timer, and telecommuting much of the time.

When he did make it in, he found operations in the office fully professional, but with a chaotic edge that he had long ago concluded was mostly engendered by Phil himself. Phil would seize the minutes he had between appointments and wander from room to room, looking to needle people. At first this appeared to be wasting time, but Charlie had come to believe it was a kind of quick polling method, Phil squeezing in impressions and reactions in the little time he had that was not scheduled. “We’re surfing the big picture today!” he would exclaim as he wandered the offices, or stood by the refrigerator drinking another ginger ale.
Those were the moments when he would start arguments for the hell of it. His staff loved it. Congressional staffers were by definition policy wonks; many had joined their high school debate clubs of their own free will. Talking shop with Phil was right up their alley. And his enthusiasm was infectious, his grin like a double shot of espresso. He had one of those smiles that invariably looked as if he was genuinely delighted. If it was directed at you, you felt a glow inside. In fact Charlie was convinced that it was Phil’s smile that had gotten him elected the first time, and maybe every time since. What made it so beautiful was that it wasn’t faked. He didn’t smile if he didn’t feel like it. But he often felt like it. That was very revealing, and so Phil had his effect.