Forty Signs of Rain Read Free

despair at all the world, she had left.
    Now here was that very same look again, on the face of this young man. Anna stopped in her tracks, feeling again that stab from five years before. Who knew what had caused these people to come halfway around the world? Who knew what they had left behind?
    She walked back over to him.
    He saw her coming, composed his features. “Yes?”
    “If you want,” she said, “later on, when it’s convenient, I could showyou some of the good lunch spots in this neighborhood. I’ve worked here a long time.”
    “Why, thank you,” he said. “That would be most kind.”
    “Is there a particular day that would be good?”
    “Well—we will be getting hungry today,” he said, and smiled. He had a sweet smile, not unlike Nick’s.
    She smiled too, feeling pleased. “I’ll come back down at one o’clock and take you to a good one then, 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.
    Anna completed her journey to the south elevators. Waiting there she was joined by Frank Vanderwal. 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, from a little country in Asia.”
    “An embassy, here?”
    “I’m not sure they know much about Washington.”
    “I see.” Frank grinned his crooked grin, a completely different thing than the young monk’s sweet smile, sardonic and knowing. “Ambassadors from Shangri-La, eh?” One of the UP arrows lit, and the elevator door next to it opened. “Well, we can use them.”

 
    P RIMATES 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 in such a way that forest cover was giving way to open 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 five 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 country 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, wouldn’t you?”
    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