Catalina had the loft window cracked two fingers because the woodstove downstairs ran hot and the guesthouse Wi-Fi router lived up here under the eaves, breathing its own small heat. Through the gap came the river noise and the smell of frost-killed willow, that particular sweetness of dying leaves that she had only learned this month and already loved more than was reasonable. Forty-three minutes to the cohort call. She pulled the laptop closer.
The Patagonian numbers had come through the platform that morning while she was at the lower pond with Anush, both of them squatting in waders that had gone stiff overnight. The shared dashboard had pinged her watch — a small green dot, the same green the network used for everything, which she had grown to find either calming or smug depending on the day. Today, calming. Verónica had finally pushed the preliminary 2041 caddisfly counts from Río Cisnes, three weeks late, with a note in Spanish: Cati, perdón por la demora, el técnico nuevo no entendía las claves de Apatania. Lo arreglé. Suerte con el cruce.
So now she had it. Río Cisnes 2041 against the East River 2041, and the partial 2039–2040 backfill from both, and then the long tail she actually wanted: the RMBL caddisfly composition record that the data team here had been pulling out of guest-scientist notebooks for the last four years, an effort she had been warned not to call complete and did not. The record reached back to the mid-1980s in usable form. Before that, in the archive interface, the rows went grey and a little annotation appeared — transcribed; taxonomy unreconciled — which meant somebody, possibly the model that lived in the data system and possibly a postdoc somewhere, had read the original handwriting but not yet decided what to do about the genus names that had changed twice since.
She opened the cross-tab query she had been building all week. The interface suggested three joins she had not thought of. She accepted two and argued with the third — it wanted to fold a Sierra Nevada Aquatic dataset into the comparison because the elevation bands matched, and she did not want it there yet, because her January rotation at SNARL had taught her exactly how differently Hilary's crew handled their light-trap subsamples and she was not ready to defend the comparison in a chapter. Not yet, she typed into the query margin. The system noted it. It would ask again next week. It always did.
The cross-tab rendered in something like four seconds. She had stopped being impressed by this and started being suspicious of it, which Anush said was the correct trajectory.
What it showed her was not what she had hoped for and not what she had feared. The high-elevation pond assemblages at East River had lost two Limnephilus morphospecies since 2034 — she had known this; everyone working here knew this — but the Río Cisnes ponds at comparable thermal regime had lost different ones, and gained a Verger that should not have been there at that elevation a decade ago. Functional groups, when she collapsed the taxa, looked almost compensated at both sites. Almost. There was a gap in shredder biomass at East River that the Patagonian site did not show, and she could not yet tell whether that was real or whether it was the Didymo years showing up sideways in the detritus pathway.
She wrote a note to herself: ask Jess about Didymo 2036–2038, shredder gut content if anyone took it. Jess was the RMBL invertebrate person, technically her informal collaborator, and had answered emails within the hour for three weeks running, which Catalina found almost embarrassing and also load-bearing for her dissertation in a way she would have to thank her for in person before she left. Not network-load-bearing. Just bearing.
Her phone buzzed. Her mother.
hija son las 10 verdad
sí mami, las 10 aquí son las 10 allá, estamos iguales esta semana
A long pause, the typing dots appearing and disappearing.
ah cierto el cambio. te quiero. no te acuestes tarde
Catalina smiled at the screen. Her mother had been trying since June to internalize that Chile and Mountain Time drifted in and out of alignment depending on whose daylight savings was when, and had decided two weeks ago to simply ask each time. This was, Catalina thought, the correct epistemic response to a confusing world. She sent back a heart and a photograph of the woodstove, which her mother would find both exotic and worrying.
Twenty-six minutes.
She opened the chapter draft. The cross-tab finding wanted a paragraph and she did not yet know how to write it. The honest sentence was something like: Functional compensation appears partial at East River and more complete at Río Cisnes through 2041, with the divergence concentrated in the shredder guild and most plausibly attributable to a legacy effect of the Didymosphenia bloom of the mid-2030s, though alternative explanations cannot yet be excluded. She wrote it. She read it. She hated the cannot yet be excluded but it was true, and her Mexican co-advisor would catch it if she softened it, and her Chilean co-advisor would catch it if she hardened it. So.
The draft auto-saved. The platform's writing assistant flagged the sentence and offered, mildly, that a comparable shredder lag had been described in a 2039 Niwot paper she had not cited. She had read the paper. She did not need to cite it here. She told the system so. It accepted this with what she had come to recognize as its small, slightly disappointed acknowledgment, which was a thing she had described to Anush as like a tía who thinks you should call your cousin. Anush had laughed for a long time.
Twelve minutes.
She went down the loft ladder for water. The guesthouse kitchen smelled like the lentil thing Anush had made last night and the coffee Jess had brewed at four in the afternoon and forgotten about. Through the kitchen window the meadow above Gothic was already in shadow, the aspens on the slope above it gone yellow in the patches where they had not gone yellow last year. Catalina had been told, several times, that this was early. She believed it. She had also been told that the first frost last week was about on time for the new on-time, which she liked as a phrase and intended to steal.
She filled her water bottle. The pipes here ran loud.
Back at the laptop, three minutes out, she opened the cohort call window. The faces began assembling in their little tiles. Hokkaido first — Yuki, in morning light, in what looked like the same fleece he had worn in March. Then the Andrews student, then the kid from Cofre de Perote whose name she could now pronounce without thinking. Then Lisbon, blurry, midnight. Then Verónica from Coyhaique, who waved at her specifically and mouthed ¿llegó? and Catalina gave her a thumbs up and Verónica grinned and made a small fist pump that was for the data landing and not for anything larger.
The facilitator at RMBL365 came on last, from the synthesis room in Crested Butte, which Catalina had been in twice now and which had the particular quality of a building that had been a community center and then become something else without losing the first thing. Behind him a whiteboard was covered in someone else's working group's marker.
"Okay," he said. "Going around. Two minutes each. What did you do this week, what's stuck, what do you need from the rest of us."
It came to her fourth. She had her two minutes ready.
"The Río Cisnes 2041 counts came through this morning," she said. "I have a first cross-tab against East River. Functional compensation looks partial here, complete there, and I think it's the Didymo legacy showing up in shredders, but I need to talk to someone who took gut contents in 2037." She paused. "Also I need somebody to tell me whether I'm allowed to be excited about this or whether I'm fooling myself."
The Andrews student laughed. Yuki nodded slowly, which meant he was thinking about it. Verónica said, in Spanish, estás permitida, pero con cuidado, and the captioning rendered it in English a half-second late.
Catalina wrote Didymo gut contents 2037? into the shared notes. Somebody in another tile — she didn't see who — typed back: I know who has those. Will intro you tomorrow.
She kept her face neutral. Outside the loft window the river kept doing its river thing. There was, she realized, a paragraph she could write tonight after the call, before she slept, that would be the first paragraph of the chapter she had been afraid to start. She would argue with it for the next week. She picked up her pen.