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.”
THE 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.