Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson Read Free Book Online Page A

exactly the material from which computer conducting had freed them; and indeed Wade was coming to this piece from several years’ work on unrecorded music in the opuses of D’Indy, Poulenc, and Martinu; but recently there had been movements, obviously related, to explore both “sensuous surface” and the neglected warhorses, and Wade felt that this performance he had put together was perhaps good enough to justify sending it out, at least to the Tchaikovsky crowd, the finale of the Fifth being somewhat in the nature of Fermat’s last theorem, to which his version might be the Wiles proof.
    But there was the phone beeping. And of course it was Phil, Senator Philip Krishna Chase of California, his boss and friend, calling from the other side of the world and uncertain of the time difference as always. Phil had two years before lost the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and was often spoken of as passé following the Republican retaking of both Senate and House that year; he had seldom been in Washington since (not that he had been here all that often before), and he appeared intent on proving that as the great telesenator he could do his job while on a more-or-less permanent junket/global pilgrimage (depending on who was characterizing it). The pundits were convinced he was wrong, and there were weekly calls for Phil to get back to his job and put his nose to the grindstone like everyone else, etc.; and back home in California Chase had the highest negatives and the highest positives ever recorded. But he had won his last reelection by twenty-three percent, and as Phil often said, California had led telecommuting from the very beginning, even before the technology was there, and most Californians were proud of their senator’s work among the many troubled, overcrowded, starved, flooded, and drought-stricken countries of the developing world which Phil made his specialty—proud also of the breakthroughs he had made in telecommuting itself, working the Senate from all over the world and introducing legislation to make it even easier for people to do likewise on their jobs. So with his power base secure Chase continued to walk and paraglide around the world, pitching in to help local relief work and employee-owned eco-businesses, and doing his Washington work by phone, fax, proxy, an active staff, and the occasional spaceplane blitz on the capital.
    So Wade was used to punching the button on the phone and hearing “Wade! Wade! Time to work!”
    “Hi, Phil.” Wade hit
save
on the Maestro and reached for a notepad. Typically these conversations would last for half an hour to an hour, and include a dozen commands, two dozen suggestions, and three dozen reflections; he took notes so he would not forget anything in the deluge. “Where are you tonight?”
    “It’s morning, Wade, it’s tomorrow where you are, and I’m in Pakistan, walking up to the sixteenth tee, five under handicap and shooting with the wind all the way home, but let’s get to the point, Wade. I hear that you are the staff expert on Antarctica.”
    “Antarctica?”
    Phil had a wild laugh; it was said to have won him his first election. “Yes, John tells me you had to work it up as part of your Southern Club studies.”
    “Yes, but that was just an overview.”
    “I know, I have it right here onscreen. ‘Complications Attendant on the Non-Renewal of the Antarctic Treaty, an Overview.’ By WN.”
    “Yes.” Wade had researched the Antarctic Treaty System (a complex of treaties, protocols and agreements) the previous year, when Senator Winston, Phil’s replacement as Chair, had directed his majority on the Foreign Relations Committee to vote to sit on the ratification of the Treaty’s scheduled renewal, which had been in negotiation the previous three years. It had seemed clear to Wade that the blockage of the ratification, aside from being part of a general strategy of obstruction of the President on all fronts, had to do with