Forty Signs of Rain. Kim Stanley Robinson

it would be best if this particular proposal were to be declined. And if the algorithm worked and became patentable, then again, keeping control of what it made would only be possible if the proposal were to be declined.

      That line of thought made him feel jumpy. In fact he was on his feet, pacing out to the mini-balcony and back in again. Then he remembered he had been planning to go out to Great Falls anyway. He quickly finished his cottage cheese, pulled his climbing kit out of the closet, changed clothes, and went back down to his car.

      The Great Falls of the Potomac was a complicated thing, a long tumble of whitewater falling down past a few islands. The complexity of the falls was its main visual appeal, as it was no very great thing in terms of total height, or even volume of water. Its roar was the biggest thing about it.

      The spray it threw up seemed to consolidate and knock down the humidity, so that paradoxically it was less humid here than elsewhere, although wet and mossy underfoot. Frank walked downstream along the edge of the gorge. Below the falls the river recollected itself and ran through a defile called Mather Gorge, a ravine with a south wall so steep that climbers were drawn to it. One section called Carter Rock was Frank’s favourite. It was a simple matter to tie a rope to a top belay, usually a stout tree trunk near the cliff’s edge, and then abseil down the rope to the bottom and either free-climb up, or clip onto the rope with an ascender and go through the hassles of self-belay.

      One could climb in teams too, of course, and many did, but there were about as many singletons like Frank here as there were duets. Some even free soloed the wall, dispensing with all protection. Frank liked to play it just a little safer than that, but he had climbed here so many times now that sometimes he abseiled down and free-climbed next to his rope, pretending to himself that he could grab it if he fell. The few routes available were all chalked and greasy from repeated use. He decided this time to clip onto the rope with the ascender.

      The river and its gorge created a band of open sky that was unusually big for the metropolitan area. This as much as anything else gave Frank the feeling that he was in a good place: on a wall route, near water, and open to the sky. Out of the claustrophobia of the great hardwood forest, one of the things about the East Coast that Frank hated the most. There were times he would have given a finger for the sight of open land.

      Now, as he abseiled down to the small tumble of big boulders at the foot of the cliff, chalked his hands, and began to climb the fine-grained old schist of the route, he cheered up. He focused on his immediate surroundings to a degree unimaginable when he was not climbing. It was like the maths work, only then he wasn’t anywhere at all. Here, he was right on these very particular rocks.

      This route he had climbed before many times. About a 5.8 or 5.9 at its crux, much easier elsewhere. Hard to find really difficult pitches here, but that didn’t matter. Even climbing up out of a ravine, rather than up onto a peak, didn’t matter. The constant roar, the spray, those didn’t matter. Only the climbing itself mattered.

      His legs did most of the work. Find the footholds, fit his rockclimbing shoes into cracks or onto knobs, then look for handholds; and up, and up again, using his hands only for balance, and a kind of tactile reassurance that he was seeing what he was seeing, that the footholds he was expecting to use would be enough. Climbing was the bliss of perfect attention, a kind of devotion, or prayer. Or simply a retreat into the supreme competencies of the primate cerebellum. A lot was conserved.

      By now it was evening. A sultry summer evening, sunset near, the air itself going yellow. He topped out and sat on the rim, feeling the sweat on his face fail to evaporate.

      There was a kayaker, below in the river. A woman, he thought, though she wore a helmet and was broad-shouldered and flat-chested – he would have been hard-pressed to say exactly how he knew, and yet he was sure. This was another savannah competency, and indeed some anthropologists postulated that this kind of rapid identification of reproductive possibility was what the enlarged neocortex had grown to do. The brain growing with such evolutionary speed, specifically to get along with the other sex. A depressing thought given the results so far.

      This woman was paddling smoothly upstream, into the hissing water that only around her seemed to be recollecting itself as a liquid. Upstream it was a steep rapids, leading to the white smash at the bottom of the falls proper.

      The kayaker pushed up into this wilder section, paddling harder upstream, then held her position against the flow while she studied the falls ahead. Then she took off hard, attacking a white smooth flow in the lowest section, a kind of ramp through the smash, up to a terrace in the whitewater. When she reached the little flat she could rest again, in another slightly more strenuous maintenance paddle, gathering her strength for the next salmonlike climb.

      Abruptly leaving the strange refuge of that flat spot, she attacked another ramp that led up to a bigger plateau of flat black water, a pool that had an eddy in it, apparently, rolling backward and allowing her to rest in place. There was no room there to gain any speed for another leap up, so that she appeared to be stuck; but maybe she was only studying her way, or waiting for a moment of reduced flow, because all of a sudden she attacked the water with a fierce flurry of paddle strokes, and seemingly willed her craft up the next pouring ramp. Five or seven desperate seconds later she levelled out again, on a tiny little bench of a refuge that did not have a pushback eddy, judging by the intensity of her maintenance paddling there. After only a few seconds she had to try a ramp to her right or get pushed back off her perch, and so she took off and fought upstream, fists moving fast as a boxer’s, the kayak at an impossible angle, looking like a miracle – until all of sudden it was swept back down, and she had to make a quick turn and then take a wild ride, bouncing down the falls by a different and steeper route than the one she had ascended, losing in a few swift seconds the height that she had taken a minute or two’s hard labour to gain.

      ‘Wow,’ Frank said, smitten.

      She was already almost down to the hissing tapestry of flat river right below him, and he felt an urge to wave to her, or stand and applaud. He restrained himself, not wanting to impose upon another athlete obviously deep in her own space. But he did whip out his cell phone and try out a GPS-oriented directory search, figuring that if she had a cell phone with a transponder in the kayak, it had to be very close to his own phone’s position. He checked his position, entered thirty metres north of that; got nothing. Same with the position twenty metres farther east.

      ‘Ah well,’ he said, and stood to go. It was sunset now, and the smooth stretches of the river had turned a pale orange. Time to go home and try to fall asleep.

      ‘In search of kayaker gal, seen going upstream at Great Falls. Great ride, I love you, please respond.’

      He would not send that in to the free papers, but only spoke it as a kind of prayer to the sunset. Down below the kayaker was turning to start upstream again.

      It could be said that science is boring, or even that science wants to be boring, in that it wants to be beyond all dispute. It wants to understand the phenomena of the world in ways that everyone can agree on and share; it wants to make assertions from a position that is not any particular subject’s position, assertions that if tested for accuracy by any sentient being would cause that being to agree with the assertions. Complete agreement; the world put under a description – stated that way, it begins to sound interesting.

      And indeed it is. Nothing human is boring. Nevertheless, the minute details of the everyday grind involved in any particular bit of scientific practice can be tedious even to the practitioners. A lot of it, as with most work in this world, involves wasted time, false leads, dead ends, faulty equipment, dubious techniques, bad data, and a huge amount of detail work. Only when it is written up in a paper does it tell a tale of things going right, step by step, in meticulous and replicable detail, like a proof in Euclid. That stage is a highly artificial result of a long process of grinding.

      In the case of Leo and his lab, and the matter of the new targeted non-viral delivery system from Maryland, several hundred hours of human labour, and many more of computer time, were devoted to an attempted repetition of an experiment described in the crucial paper, ‘In Vivo Insertion of cDNA 1568rr Into CBA/H, BALB/c, and C57BL/6 Mice’.

      At