This came down to just a few next-door neighbors, but she hoped just saying it would pour some oil on the waters.
“Thanks,” Charlotte said. “There’ll always be meetings.”
New York’s most congested time was 1904. Or 2104.
The city lies at latitude forty degrees north, same as Madrid, Ankara, Beijing.
How’s all the big money in New York been made? Astor, Vanderbilt, Fish … In real estate, of course.
observed John Dos Passos
I come in from the canal. I don’t know anything.
It is well and good to ask what we need to know.
—William Bronk
descendant of the Bronx Bronks
e) Vlade
Mayday,” the Met said from Vlade’s wall monitor. He had chosen a woman’s voice for the building, and now he found himself sitting up in bed reaching for the light and then his clothes. “What’s up?” he asked. “Report.”
“Water in the sub-basement.”
“Shit.” He leaped up and threw on his Carhartts. “How much how fast, and where?”
“I have reported the first sensing of moisture. Speed of inflow not established. Room B201.”
“Okay, tell me the speed of inflow when you have one.”
“Will do.”
Vlade clumped downstairs to the sub-basement and the lights came on ahead of him as he moved. The sub-basement was not only below the waterline, it was below the rockline as well, as it had been cut into bedrock at the time of the building’s construction, in the first years of the twentieth century. Every part of the building but the tower had been replaced in 1999, when the foundation had been dug deeper still. No one then worried about waterproofing, and the bedrock had cracks in it, as all rock did. When the island had been dry land that hadn’t mattered, but now it did, as water from the canals seeped slowly but inexorably down cracks in the rock. The concrete cladding the walls of the sub-basement was therefore harder to seal than on the floors above, because you could get to the outsides of those higher parts of the wall, either by diving to them or by caissoning the canals. Access was all, and given the lack of access he could only seal the sub-basement on the inside surfaces of its walls. This was profoundly unsatisfactory, as it left the concrete of the walls and floor exposed to seep, and thus getting degraded in the usual ways: corrosion, melting, slumping, disintegration. But there was nothing to be done about it.
Because of this unsolvable problem he kept the sub-basement empty, its floor and walls entirely clear. Some people on the board complained that this was a waste of space, but he was adamant. He had to be able to see what was happening. It was one of the worst vulnerabilities in the whole building.
So when he hurried into room B201, he could see all of it immediately. A big bright space, looking wet everywhere because the lights reflected off the so-called diamond sheeting that covered every surface. It was actually a graphenated composite, but as it was transparent and shiny, Vlade like everyone else called it diamond. It was not quite as hard as diamond, but it was more flexible and could be applied as a spray. Really the new composites were simply wonderful when it came to strength, flexibility, weight, everything you wanted out of building materials. They made submarine living possible.
The floor was slightly knobbled to create better footing; the walls were smoother but brushed like brushed aluminum, precisely to reduce the glare of reflected light. What it meant was a glitter instead of a glare, a glitter as if everything were damp and sparkling with dew. It was enough to give him a little startle of dismay, even though it always looked this way.
That being the case, he had to search around to find the leak. The building had indeed reported the first sign of moisture; he only found it by deploying his humidity sensor wand. The damp spot was in the far corner, where the north wall, east wall, and floor met. Which was odd, as a point like that was precisely where the sheeting got sprayed thicker than usual. Still, this was where the wand was pinging. He sat down on the cool knobbled floor, brushed his hand over it. Yep, wet. He smelled the damp, got nothing. Took his flashlight from his tool belt and aimed the strongest beam at the corner. It took some moving of his head back and forth to find the right focus for his old eyes, but finally he spotted it: fracture. Microfracture.
But this made no sense. He whipped out his pocket lens, leaned over on his knees and held the flashlight at an angle, moved the lens in and out. Blurry big view of the blob of diamond spray that had congealed or dried or what-have-you in the corner. Fracture, yes. Welling water in the crack grew till the surface tension on it broke and it slid onto the floor, just as it would have at larger scales. But fuck if the hole didn’t look drilled.
He swabbed the corner clear, took a macro photo with his wristpad. The crack indeed looked round, like two little holes actually, the water welling up hemispherically like blood from two pinpricks. Clear blood. “Damn.”
He swabbed it again, then pasted over the corner with a dab of leakstopper. He wanted something more substantial for later, like a thick spray of sheeting, but for now this would have to do.
“Vlade,” the Met said in his earbud, “mayday. Water in the midbasement, southwest corner, room B104.”
“How much?”
“First detection of moisture. Speed of inflow undetermined.”
He hustled up the broad stairs and across the room surrounding the stairwell to room B104, favoring his bad left knee. The rooms on this floor were smaller than the ones on the floor below. He kept them equally empty against the walls, though their middles were filled with boxes in stacks he had organized himself. The floor was ordinary concrete, the walls diamond sheeted, as below. Here the outside of the building was in water even at low tide, as was true of the floor above it, the old ground floor. The one above that was intertidal. Right now it was high tide, so there would be a little more pressure on any submarine leaks, but for two leaks to spring at almost the same time struck Vlade as extremely suspicious, especially given the corner position and drilled look of the one below.
Again his humidity wand led him quickly to the leak, which was low on a wall. Here the wall was sheeted both inside and outside, so a leak made even less sense than the one below. This one looked like a crack rather than a pinprick. Like a stress fracture perhaps. Water oozed from the bottom of the crack, which was almost vertical. Beads of water, welling up and dripping down the wall.
“God damn it.”
He gooed the crack with another liberal dab of leakstopper, thought it over, then stomped around the elevator shaft to his room. He got out of his Carhartts and into his swim trunks, cursing all the while. The lower leak would necessarily have been drilled from the inside. He didn’t want to give any oral commands to the building about the security cameras, because the camera issue had not been resolved to his satisfaction yet, and the whole system could be compromised. So he would have to wait to check that until others were there to help and witness. First order of business was to inspect the outside of the building to see if the higher crack extended all the way through to the outside. If it did, that would be simpler than if it was a complex leak in which the interior crack was not matched by an exterior one. But either way was bad.
The wetsuits and dive tanks and gear were in the boathouse, in a storage room next to his office. People were getting out in their watercraft without undue stress, it seemed, and Su nodded nervously to him that all was well. “I’m going to take a quick dive,” Vlade told him, which caused Su to frown. Dives were never supposed to be solo, but Vlade did it all the time around the building, accompanied only by a little sub sled.
“I’ll keep the phone on,” Su said, to remind him, and Vlade nodded and began the somewhat arduous process of getting his wetsuit on. For building inspections he could use the smallest tank, and the headset was just a mask settling onto the hood like a snorkel mask. The seal was not completely hermetic but good enough for brief work near the surface, and he could scrub down afterward.
There wer
e steps down into the water inside the boathouse. Only three were now exposed, which meant it was almost high tide. Down he went, feeling like the swamp thing from the eponymous movie, the scariest movie of all time in his opinion. Happily he was not dragging some poor rapidly aging maiden down with him. Nor even the sled, which was not needed for a dive like this.
The water was cold as always, even in the wetsuit, but he had been warming up so fast that it felt good to be cooled. Submerge, quick test of the gear, then out the boathouse door into the bacino, swimming horizontally. The wetsuit’s feet were just slightly webbed and finned, and that too felt good. Headlamp on, powerful beam, nevertheless mostly catching the particulates in the god-awful water of the city, as always. Actually the hundreds of millions of clams in the aquaculture cages all over the intertidal were doing yeoman work in filtering clean the water. Now he could usually see at least two or three meters, and sometimes more. Stay deep enough to not get knocked on the head by some boat’s keel or prop, but high enough not to run into the bacino’s aquaculture pens. The familiar weightlessness of neutral buoyancy, of horizontal underwater life. Lots of fish in the highest cages: salmon, sea trout, catfish, the sinuous schools of fishy bodies all turning together against the cage sides.
Swim around the northwest corner of the building, hovering over the old sidewalk like a ghost. Sidewalk, curb, street: always a little stab of the uncanny to see these signs of New York as it used to be. Twenty-fourth Street.
Around the corner, float to the spot on the wall outside room B104. GPS to be sure he was there. He put his face to the wall and inspected the diamond sheen inch by inch, running his gloved fingers over it too. Nothing super obvious … ah yes, right outside the inner crack, it seemed: an outer crack. What the fuck?
Vlade had spent ten years in the city’s water division, working on sewage lines, utilidors, subway tunnels, and aquafarms, mostly. So being underwater in one of the canals was about as ordinary to him as walking the streets uptown, or indeed more ordinary, as he hardly ever went uptown. The surface overhead surged slightly back and forth like a breathing thing. Opalescent sheen to the east where the sun was rising between buildings. Wakes crisscrossing, slapping against the Met and North, rebounding and breaking against each other, bubbles coming into being and snapping out of existence. A glimpse of the sun now, shattering on the water when he looked east along Twenty-fourth. All normal; but still he found himself creeped out. Something was wrong.
Just to be sure, he swam to the building’s northeast corner and shined his headlamp at the juncture of building and sidewalk, looking five or six meters on both sides. This was always a weird sight, with the goo that sealed the juncture of building and ancient sidewalk looking like congealed gray lava, and the sidewalk itself diamond-sheeted, even to a certain extent the old street surface. This was the weak point for every building still upright in the shallows of lower Manhattan; you could only seal surfaces so far out from the building, and beyond that they were permeable. Indeed one of the projects of city services was to caisson and pump out every drowned street in the city, about two hundred miles of streets all told, and diamond sheet every surface up to above high tide, before letting the water back in. This could only ever be partly successful, as of course there was already water everywhere down there below street level, saturating the old concrete and asphalt and soil, so they would be sealing some of it in while keeping the rest out. It wasn’t clear to Vlade that this would be particularly useful. Closing the barn door after the horses had leaked, as far as Vlade and many other water rats were concerned, but the hydrologists had declared it would help the situation, and so slowly it got done. As if there weren’t more pressing chores on the list. But whatever. Looking at the edge of the sealant and sheeting and the beginning of bare street concrete, now a canal bottom, Vlade could feel in his gut why the hydrologists had wanted to try something. Anything.
Inspection complete, he swam slowly back into the boathouse and clomped dripping up the steps, this time reminding himself of the creature from the black lagoon.
When he was out of the wetsuit, and had sprayed down his face and neck with bleach, and washed that off and dried himself and gotten back in his civvies, he called his old friend Armando from Lame Ass’s submarine services. “Hey Mando, can you pop over and take a look at my building? I got a couple of leaks.” Mando agreed to schedule him in. “Thanks.”
He looked at the photos on his pad, then turned to his screens and called up the building’s leak records. Also, after some hesitation, the building’s security cameras.
Nothing obvious. But then again, after checking his log: there was nothing recorded on the basement cameras, even on days when people had definitely gone into those sub-basement rooms, as recorded in the logs.
Often after a dive he felt queasy, everyone did from time to time; they said it was nitrogen buildup, or anoxia, or the toxic water with all its organics and effluents and microflora and fauna and outright poisons, the whole chemical stew that made up the city’s estuarine flow, my God! It made you sick, that was just the way it was. But today he felt sicker than usual.
He called up Charlotte Armstrong. “Charlotte, where are you?”
“I’m walking to my office, I’m almost there. I walked the whole way.” She sounded pleased with herself.
“Good. Hey, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like someone is sabotaging our building.”
Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe were the first artists in America to live and work in a skyscraper.
Supposedly.
Love in Manhattan? I Don’t Think So.
—Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City
La Guardia: I’m making beer.
Patrolman Mennella: All right.
La Guardia: Why don’t you arrest me?
Patrolman Mennella: I guess that’s a job for a Prohibition agent if anybody.
La Guardia: Well, I’m defying you. I thought you might accommodate me.
f) Amelia
Amelia’s airship the Assisted Migration was a Friedrichshafen Deluxe Midi, and she loved it. She had called the autopilot Colonel Blimp at first, but its voice was so friendly, helpful, and Germanic that she switched to calling it Frans. When she ran into trouble of one sort or another, which was the part of her programs that her viewers loved the most, especially if the trouble somehow lost her her clothes, she would say, “Oh, Frans, yikes, please do a three-sixty here and get us out of this!” and Frans would take over, executing the proper maneuver whatever it might be, while making a heavy joke, always almost the same joke, about how a 360-degree turn would only get you going the way you were already going. Everyone had heard it by now, so it was a running joke, or a flying joke as Frans called it, but also, in practical terms, part of a problem solved. Frans was smart. Of course he had to leave some decisions to her, being judgment calls outside his purview. But he was surprisingly ingenious, even in what you might have called this more human realm of executive function.
The blimp, actually a dirigible—if you acknowledged that an internal framework could be only semirigid or demirigid, made of aerogels and not much heavier than the gas in the ballonets—was forty meters long and had a capacious gondola, running along the underside of the airship like a fat keel. It had been built in Friedrichshafen right before the turn of the century and since then had flown many miles, in a career somewhat like those of the tramp steamers of the latter part of the nineteenth century. The keys to its durability were its flexibility and its lightness, and also the photovoltaic outer skin of the bag, which made the craft effectively autonomous in energy terms. Of course there was sun damage eventually, and supplies were needed on a regular basis, but often it was possible to restock without landing by meeting with skyvillages they passed. So, like the millions of other similar airships wandering the skies, they didn’t really ever have to come down. And like millions of other aircraft occupants, for many years Amelia had therefore not gone down. It had been a refuge she had needed
. During those years there had seldom been a time when she couldn’t see other airships in the distance, but that was fine by her, even comforting, as it gave her the idea of other people without their actual presence, and made the atmosphere into a human space, an ever-shifting calvinocity. It looked as if after the coastlines had drowned, people had taken to the skies like dandelion seeds and recongregated in the clouds.
Although now she saw again that in the polar latitudes the skies were less occupied. Two hundred miles north of Quebec she spotted only a few aircraft, mostly big freighters at much higher altitudes, taking advantage of their absence of human crews to get up into the bottom of the jet stream and hurry to their next rendezvous.
As they approached Hudson Bay, Frans dove steeply, altering their pitch by pumping helium around in the ballonets and by tilting the flaps located behind the powerful turbines housed in two big cylinders attached to the sides of the craft. Together these actions shoved their nose down and sent them humming toward the ground.
The October nights were growing long up here, and the frozen landscape was a black whiteness to every horizon, with the icy gleam of a hundred lakes making it clear just how crushed and then flooded the Canadian shield had been by the great ice cap of the last ice age. It looked more like an archipelago than a continent. Near dawn, a glow of light on the horizon to the north marked the town they were visiting: Churchill, Manitoba. As they dropped over the town and headed for its airship field, they saw it was a desolate little knot of buildings, far enough down the western shore of Hudson Bay that it got no traffic from the busy Northwest Passage, except for an occasional cruise ship visiting in the hope of seeing whatever polar bears might remain.