She smiled too, feeling pleased. “I’ll come back at one, if you like.”
“That would be most welcome. Very kind.”
She nodded. “At one, then,” already recalibrating her work schedule for the day. The boxed sandwich could be stored in her office’s little refrigerator.
With that Anna went to the south elevators. Waiting there she was joined by Frank Vanderwal, one of her program officers. They greeted each other, and she said, “Hey, I’ve got an interesting jacket for you.”
He mock-rolled his eyes. “Is there any such thing for a burnt-out case like me?”
“Oh I think so.” She gestured back at the atrium. “Did you see our new neighbor? We lost the travel agency but gained an embassy.”
“An embassy, here?”
“I’m not sure they know much about Washington.”
“Ah.” Frank grinned his crooked grin, very different than the young monk’s sweet smile. “Ambassadors from Shangri-La, eh?” One of the UP arrows lit, and the elevator door under it opened. “Well, we can use them.”
Primates in elevators. People stood in silence looking up at the lit numbers on the display console, as per custom.
Again the experience caused Frank Vanderwal to contemplate the nature of their species, in his usual sociobiologist’s mode. They were mammals, social primates: a kind of hairless chimp. Their bodies, brains, minds, and societies had grown to their current state in East Africa over a period of about two million years, while the climate was shifting and forest was giving way to savannah.
Much was explained by this. Naturally they were distressed to be trapped in a small moving box. No savannah experience could be compared to it. The closest analog might have been crawling into a cave, no doubt behind a shaman carrying a torch, everyone filled with great awe and very possibly under the influence of psychotropic drugs and religious rituals. An earthquake during such a visit to the underworld would be about all the savannah mind could contrive as an explanation for a modern trip in an elevator car. No wonder an uneasy silence reigned; they were in the presence of the sacred. And the last ten thousand years of civilization had not been anywhere near enough time for any evolutionary adaptations to alter these mental reactions. They were still only good at the things they had been good at on the savannah.
Anna Quibler broke the taboo on speech, as people would when all the fellow passengers were cohorts. She said to Frank, continuing her story, “I went over and introduced myself. They’re from an island in the Bay of Bengal.”
“Did they say why they rented the space here?”
“They said they had picked it very carefully.”
“Using what criteria?”
“I didn’t ask. On the face of it, you’d have to say proximity to NSF.”
Frank snorted. “That’s like the joke about the starlet and the Hollywood writer, isn’t it?”
Anna wrinkled her nose at this, surprising Frank; although she was proper, she was not prudish. Then he got it: her disapproval was not at the joke, but at the idea that these new arrivals would be that hapless. She said, “I think they’ll be interesting to have here.”
Homo sapiens is a species that exhibits sexual dimorphism. It’s more than a matter of bodies; the archeological record seemed to Frank to support the notion that the social roles of the two sexes had deviated early on. These differing roles could have led to differing thought processes, such that it would be possible to characterize plausibly the existence of unlike approaches even to ostensibly non-gender-differentiated activities, such as science. So that there could be a male practice of science and a female practice of science, in other words, and these could be substantially different activities.
These thoughts flitted through Frank’s mind as their elevator ride ended and he and Anna walked down the hall to their offices. Anna was as tall as he was, with a nice figure, but the dimorphism differentiating them was in their habits of mind and their scientific practice, and that might explain why he was a bit uncomfortable with her. Not that this was a full characterization of his attitude, but she did science in a way that he found annoying. It was not a matter of her being warm and fuzzy, as you might expect from the usual characterizations of feminine thought—on the contrary, Anna’s scientific work (she still often coauthored papers in statistics, despite her bureaucratic load) often displayed a finicky perfectionism that made her a very meticulous scientist, a first-rate statistician—smart, quick, competent in a range of fields and really excellent in more than one. As good a scientist as one could find for the rather odd job of running the Bioinformatics Division at NSF.
But she was so intense about it. A kind of Puritan of science, rational to an extreme. And yet of course that was all a front, as with the early Puritans; the hyperrational coexisted in her with all the emotional openness, intensity, and variability that was the American female interactional paradigm and social role. Every female scientist was therefore a kind of Mr. Spock, the rational side foregrounded and emphasized while the emotional side was denied.
On the other hand, judged on that basis, Frank had to admit that Anna seemed less split-natured than many women scientists he had known. Pretty well integrated, really. He had spent many hours of the past year working with her, engaged in interesting discussions, and he liked her. His discomfort came not from any of her irritating habits, not even the nitpicking or hairsplitting that made her so strikingly eponymous (though no one dared joke about that to her); no, it was more the way her hyperscientific attitude combined with her passionate female expressiveness to suggest a complete science, or even a complete humanity. It reminded Frank of himself!
Not of the self that he allowed others to see, of course, but rather of his internal life as he alone experienced it. He too was stuffed with extreme aspects of both rationality and emotionality. This was what made him uncomfortable: Anna was too much like him. She reminded him of things about himself he did not want to think about. But he was helpless to stop his trains of thought. That was one of his problems.
Halfway around the circumference of the sixth floor, they came to their offices. Frank’s was one of a number of cubicles carving up a larger space; Anna’s was a true office right across from his cubicle, a room of her own, with a foyer for her secretary, Aleesha. Both their spaces, and all the others in the maze of crannies and rooms, were filled with the computers, file cabinets, and crammed bookshelves that one found in scientific offices everywhere. The decor was standard beige for everything, indicating the purity of science.
In this case it was all rendered human, and even handsome, by the big windows on the interior sides of every room, allowing everyone to look across the central atrium and into all the other offices. This open space, and the sight of fifty to a hundred other humans, made each office a slice or echo of the savannah. The occupants were correspondingly more comfortable at the primate level. Frank did not suffer the illusion that anyone had consciously planned this effect, but he admired the architect’s instinctive grasp of what would get the best work out of the building’s occupants.
He sat down at his desk, gazed out across the atrium. He was near the end of his year-long stay at NSF, and the workload was becoming less and less important to him. Piles of articles lay in stacks on every horizontal surface, and his computer contained hundreds of proposals for his evaluation. He had a lot of work to do. Instead he looked out the window.
The colorful mobile filling the upper half of the atrium was a painfully simple thing, basic shapes in primary colors, very like a kindergartner’s scribble. Frank’s many activities included rock climbing, and often he had occupied his mind by imagining the moves he would need to climb the mobile. There were some hard sections, but it would make for a fun route.
Past the mobile, he could see into one hundred and eight other rooms (he had counted). In them people typed at screens, talked in couples or on the phone, read, or sat in seminar rooms looking at photos on screens,