“No, but I’m going to join him now, we’re putting a new guest into the hotello in the farm. What’s up?”
“Well, I’ve got kind of a situation here. I made a mistake, I guess you’d call it, and then it all happened so fast.”
“What?” Charlotte began walking toward the elevator, and for some reason Jojo came along.
“Well,” Amelia said, “basically my polar bears have taken over my airship.”
“What?”
“I don’t think they really have, but Frans is flying us, and the bears are on the bridge with him.”
“How does that work? Aren’t they eating him or something?”
“Frans is the autopilot, sorry. So far they’ve left him alone, but if they accidentally turn him off or tweak him, I worry that it could be bad.”
“Is the autopilot something a bear could change?”
“Well, he answers to verbal commands, so if they roar or whatever, something might happen.”
“Are they roaring?”
“Well, yeah. They kind of are. I think they’re getting hungry. And so am I,” she added miserably.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the tool closet.”
“Can you get to the pantry?”
“Not without going through, you know, bear country.”
“Hmm. Well, wait just a second, I’m almost to the farm and Vlade is there. Let’s see what he says about it.”
“Sure, thanks.”
Jojo raised her eyebrows when Charlotte looked at her, and said in a low voice, “Sorry, I just want to hear what happens here, if that’s okay. And check in with Franklin again.”
“Fine by me,” Charlotte said. The elevator doors opened on the farm floor and the two women hurried over to the southeast corner. Vlade and Franklin and the boys and their elderly friend were all gathered outside the hotello, seated on chairs and little gardening stools.
Charlotte interrupted them: “Vlade, can you help us a second here? I’ve got Amelia on the phone, and she’s in a situation on her blimp there, the polar bears have gotten loose.”
That got their attention instantly, and Vlade said loudly, “Amelia, is that true? Are you there?”
“Yes,” Amelia said unhappily.
“Tell me what happened.”
Amelia described the sequence of questionable moves that had gotten her locked in a closet on an airship filled with polar bears on the loose. Vlade shook his head as he listened.
“Well, Amelia,” he said when she finished. “I told you never to fly alone, it just isn’t safe.”
“I always fly alone.”
“That doesn’t make it safe.”
“It makes it dangerous,” Franklin opined. “That’s what her show is about.”
“I can hear that,” Amelia reminded them. “Who is that?”
“Franklin Garr here. I live on the thirty-sixth floor.”
“Oh hi, nice to meet you. But, you know, I don’t mean to contradict you or anything, but it isn’t all true what you said, and anyway it doesn’t help me now.”
“Sorry!” Franklin said. With an uneasy glance at Jojo, now standing beside him (which had pleased him greatly, Charlotte saw), he added, “Are you in touch with the autopilot? Can you fly the thing?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe try tilting the blimp as straight up as it will go, see if the bears fall back down into their room? Kind of a gravity assist?”
Vlade glanced at Franklin with a surprised look. “Worth a try,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, you haven’t lost anything by it.”
“But I don’t know how well we’ll float when we’re vertical.”
“Just the same,” Franklin said confidently. “More or less. Same amount of helium, right? You could maybe even accelerate upward. You’d put a little downward force on the bears.”
Again Vlade agreed this was a good idea.
“Okay,” Amelia said. “I guess I’ll try it. Can you stay on the line?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, dear,” Charlotte said. “You’re like a radio play.”
“Don’t make fun of me! I’m hungry. And I have to go to the bathroom.”
“There’ll be a bucket in most tool closets,” Vlade said.
“Oh my God I’m tilting, the blimp is tilting up!”
“Hold on,” more than one of them urged her.
“Oh my God they’re out there.” This was followed by some loud thumps. Then radio silence.
“Amelia?” Charlotte asked. “Are you okay?”
A long, tense pause.
Then she replied. “I’m okay. Let me call you back. I’ve got to deal.”
The call went dead.
“Yikes,” Franklin said after a wondering silence. Charlotte saw Jojo elbow him in the ribs, saw him wince and then ignore it, eyes slightly crossed.
The others stood around, uncertain what to do. Charlotte gestured at the hotello door. “Have you had a look inside yet?”
“No, we were just going to do that,” Vlade said.
“Might as well. Our cloud star will get back to us when she can.”
The hotello was really just a walk-in tent, so Charlotte and Franklin and Jojo stayed outside it as Vlade led the old man in with the two boys. To Charlotte this viewing was a formality only; beggars can’t be choosers. She went to the south wall of the farm, sat on one of the chairs by the rail, and looked to the east toward Peter Cooper Village, now a kind of bay studded with remnants of the many fifteen-story towers that had once stood there. Anything built on landfill rather than bedrock was melting. To the south some towers of light illuminated the mostly dark downtown: the old towers of Wall Street, looking like spaceships ready for takeoff. Finance coming back home to roost. It gave her the creeps.
A southern wind came in over the rail, mild for autumn, and she pulled her sweater tighter around her. The two tall glassine spires just to the south of them spoiled the view, and she hoped, as she always did, that their slight tilt to the east meant they would soon fall over, like dominoes. She hated them as architectural fashion models, skinny, blank, featureless, owned by finance, nothing to do with real life. One giant apartment per floor. People living in glass houses and yet throwing stones. She had heard that most of the owners of these apartments only occupied them a week or two per year. Oligarchs, plutocrats, flitting around the world like vampire capital itself. And of course it was even worse uptown, in the new graphene superscrapers.
The men ducked out of the hotello and sat back down around her, all except for the old man, who stood at the railing, elbows on the rail, looking down. The boys sat at his feet, Vlade on the chair next to Charlotte, Franklin and Jojo on the chairs beyond them. A rare chance to rest.
“I hate those chopsticks,” Charlotte said to the old man, gesturing at the two glass splinters. They had refused to join LMMAS, and even the Madison Square Association. She took this as a personal affront, as she had helped to organize the buildings around the bacino into a working alliance within LMMAS, like a ring of city-states around a small rectangular lake.
The old man eyed them briefly. “Money,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“I’m surprised they haven’t fallen yet.”
“Me too. They’re tilting though. They may go.”
“Will they hit us?”
“I don’t think so. They’re tilting to the east, see. They’re like the leaning towers of money.”
“Seems dangerous.” He peered down to the east. “It’s dark that way. But it looks like there’s still buildings they would land on.”
“Sure,” Charlotte said. “Hard to tell what’s there at night. I like that. It looks good, don’t you think?”
He nodded. “Beautiful.”
“As always.”
At this he frowned, then shook his head. “Not always.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not the day it went under, I mean. That was not beautiful.”
“You saw
it?” Roberto asked incredulously, looking up at his face.
The old man glanced down at him, rubbing his jaw. “Yeah, I saw it,” he said. “Start of the Second Pulse. Breach of Bjarke’s Wall. I was about your age. You can’t imagine I was ever that young, can you.”
“Nope,” Roberto said.
“Well, I was. Hard though that is to believe. I can’t believe it myself. But I know it’s true, because I was there.”
He rubbed his face with his right hand, looked down blindly. The others glanced at each other.
He said, “Everyone thought it would happen gradually, and out in the boroughs it did. But they had built a surge wall about a hundred years before, Bjarke’s Wall, to keep downtown from flooding. It worked too. It was a berm. It was different in different places, because they had to fit it in where they could. Amazing they could do it at all, but they did. It went all the way around downtown, from Riverside West down behind Battery Park, up the east side to the UN building, where it cut up the rise to Central Park. Twelve miles. There were cuts in it for streets and all, where gates would close if a flood came. They closed it a bunch of times and it worked. But high tide kept getting higher, and they had to close the gates more and more. It was the same in London with the Thames River Barrier. When they closed the wall, my dad would take me down to the path running along its top at Thirty-third. Sometimes the Hudson would be raging, whitecaps all over it. And the water would get so high we could see that the river was higher than the city. You could lose your balance if you looked at both sides at once. It kind of made you sick to your stomach. Because the water was higher than the land. You couldn’t believe it. People would get the staggers and laugh, or cry. It was a thing.”
“I’d like to see that,” Roberto said.
“Maybe you would. We all went and looked. But you could see what could happen. And then it did.”
“You were there?” Roberto asked.
“I was there. It was a storm surge. I was like you, I wanted to go to the berm and see it, but my dad wouldn’t let me, he said this might be the time. My dad was smart. So he wouldn’t let me go, but then after school I went anyway. There were people all up and down the berm. The river was crazy. There was a south wind lashing it. It was raining too. You had to turn your back to it. You couldn’t take a step without you might fall. Mostly we sat down and got soaked, but we stayed, because I don’t know why. It was a thing. But then the streets on the inside of the berm were flooding. Everyone took off north on the berm path to get back up to Forty-second, because we could see that the wall must have broken somewhere downtown. Some people stood on the path shouting at us to walk and not run. They were loud. They were like—insistent. But we could see we were about to be on a berm with water on both sides of us, so we walked pretty fast. But we walked.”
For a while the old man stood there staring to the west.
“So you got off the berm?” Roberto said.
“Yes. I followed people off. We caught glimpses. The water coming in was brown and white. Filled with stuff. It fell down subway entries and then shot back up into the air. It was loud. After a while no one could hear what anyone was saying. Taxis were floating around. It was crazy. It didn’t look anything like what you see down there now. It was crazy time.”
“Weren’t there people?” Roberto asked.
“There were some. Mostly people ran uptown and got away, but some got caught somehow, sure. Floating in the water like logs, wearing their clothes. They were wearing their own clothes.”
“What else would they wear?” Franklin asked, and Jojo elbowed him so hard his chair squeaked, and he did too. Charlotte began to like Jojo a little better.
“It just struck fast, that’s all. They had been out there doing their ordinary day. But boom and that was it. Later people said it took less than two hours. The first breach was said to be a gate down near Pier Forty that gave way. After that the river tore the berm open a couple hundred yards wide. All the buildings near the breach went down. Water is strong.”
“What did you do when you got off the berm?” Stefan asked.
“Everyone walked north. We knew to get north. It felt like the whole city would go under, but uptown is a lot higher than downtown. It’s obvious now, but that day was the first time it was obvious. The flood went up to about Thirtieth. And even though it was fast, it did take two hours. So people just ran north ahead of it. They abandoned whatever they were doing and ran in the streets. We did too. Central Park had millions of people in it, standing there looking at each other. Trying to help people who had been hurt. Talking it over. No one could believe it. But it was true. A new day had come. We knew it had happened, because there we were. We knew it would never be the same. Downtown was gone. So that was very strange. People were stunned, you could see it. We stood there looking at each other! No one could believe it, but there we were. Everyone was like, well, here we are—it must be real. But it was like a dream. I could see that the grown-ups were just as amazed as I was. I saw that grown-ups were basically just the same as me, but bigger. I found that very strange. What happens next? What are we gonna do? A lot of people had just lost everything. But we were alive, you know? It was just … strange.”
“So was your home flooded?” Roberto said.
The old man nodded. “Oh yeah. But my parents worked uptown. So I walked to my dad’s office, and he wasn’t there, but they called him and he came and got me. He was so relieved to see me that he forgot to be mad. But some people he knew were missing. So we were still sad. It was a very sad day.”
He stared at the city below them, serene in the moonlight, almost quiet.
“Hard to believe,” Stefan said again.
Again the old man nodded.
They looked at the city. New York underwater. New York neck deep.
The old man took a deep breath. “That day is why they’ll never polder the harbor. I don’t know why people even talk about that. Dam the Narrows and Hell Gate, pump the Hudson into the sea—it’s crazy. Something breaks and boom, it would all go under again. Including Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx. I can’t even imagine how many people would get killed.”
“Didn’t they all get flooded too?” Stefan asked.
“Sure, but slower, and earlier, because they didn’t have the wall. Bjarke’s Wall gave lower Manhattan about ten extra years.”
“Do they know how many died that day?” Roberto asked.
“They could only guess. A couple thousand, I think they said.”
Long silence. City noise below. The slop of the canals.
The old man turned from the railing and sat down on a wooden rocking chair by the rail. “But here we are. Life goes on. So thank you for the nice tent. I appreciate it. Hopefully the boys will help me get some stuff out of my place tomorrow.”
“Some of us could help too,” Charlotte said.
“No no,” all three of them said at once. “We’ll manage.”
They’re plotting something, Charlotte thought. Retrieving something they don’t want people to know about. Well, the dispossessed often had a need to hold on to something. She had seen that often in her work. Things they held on to with all their might, that meant they were still them. A suitcase, a dog—something.
She said to the old man, “You must be tired. You should get some rest. And I think Vlade and I should get back to Amelia, see how she’s doing.”
“Ah yes,” the old man said. “Good luck with that! It sounds like she’s in a fix.”
I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.
said Charles Darwin
d) Amelia
Frans tilted Amelia’s airship so far toward the vertical, bow high, stern low, that Amelia was forced to sit on the back wall of her closet, in a clutter of stuff. She forgot her hunger and her need to pee as she heard the thumps outside the closet; sounded like they could be the thumps of bears falling toward the stern, but how to be sure? Their claws, although awesome, were probably not enough to hold their
massive bodies if the floor suddenly became a wall, which it had. And what would they do about it if they were now hanging on somewhere up above her? She found that hard to imagine. Although she believed with all her heart that every mammal was as intelligent as she was, an idea given solid support by evidence from all sides of the question, still, every once in a while something would happen to remind her that although all mammals were equally intelligent, some were more equal than others. In grasping the import of a new situation, humans were sometimes quicker on the uptake than some of their brethren. Sometimes. In this case, maybe it helped that she knew she was flying in an airship that had just pointed its bow up at the sky. These poor (but dangerous) bears might not even be aware they were flying, so such a tilt could have been very disorienting indeed. But who knew?
Also, some of them might have fallen only onto the back wall of the bridge, and thus still be up there. It seemed quite possible. But there was no way of knowing without going to look. And what if she did that and found them there? She wasn’t sure what she would do about that.
Gritting her teeth, holding her breath, flushing hot all over her skin, she opened the utility closet door a tiny bit and took a look down the hall, ready to slam the door again if she had to. Her view was restricted sternward, thus down, and indeed she could see bears, looking like big people in white fur coats, down there sitting on the back wall of their enclosure. One was on his back, another was sitting and sniffing the air curiously, very like a dog; a couple more were tangled in a mass, like wrestlers both of whom had lost. They were inside their room and apparently had descended through its open door, which was still open, having flopped all the way open against the wall, a lucky thing.
This was encouraging, but it left two bears unaccounted for. These might have fallen only as far as the stern wall of the bridge, and thus still be where she needed to go. Also, if she were to go out into the hall, it was not immediately obvious why she too would not slide down the hall and join the bears in their room. That would be bad. If she managed to slide down there and then stop herself, close their door and lock them in, that would be good, up to a point; but if there were two more bears still on the loose, now locked out of their own room, that would be bad. There seemed more bad than good out there, but she couldn’t stay where she was forever. Somehow she had to take advantage of the situation while it lasted. She wasn’t sure how long the Assisted Migration could stay standing on its tail; it seemed awkward and un-aerodynamic to her. She had not even known it could do it without falling. Like she was going to, if she didn’t watch out.