Frans kept lowering the airship toward her, the swing’s rope coiling down past her into the forest, until the craft filled her sky, and its gondola almost knocked her on the head. She ducked, and talked it over with Frans in a somewhat urgent back-and-forth; then the open bay door of the gondola dropped slowly beside her, smooshing down into leaves until she was able to grab its doorway and pull herself into the bay. After that she undid her harness and hauled in the swing line by hand, pulling hard a few times to unsnag it from branches below. When it was all inside she told Frans to shut the door and rise, while she hustled back upstairs to get some hot chocolate into her.
Her audience had liked it, feedback indicated, although as usual there were sad viewers complaining that she had stayed dressed, prominent among them her producer Nicole, who warned her it was going to lose her viewers. Amelia ignored them all, Nicole in particular. On they flew. Over the scrubby pine barrens, then the green and empty New Jersey shore, which had been a drowned coastline even before the floods; then out over the blue Atlantic.
Thus, as she reminded her audience, they had flown over one corridor in the great system of corridors that now shared the continent with its cities and farms, and the interstate highways and the railways and power lines. Overlapping worlds, a stack of overlays, an accidental megastructure, a postcarbon landscape, each of the many networks performing its function in the great dance, and the habitat corridors providing a life space for their horizontal brothers and sisters, as Amelia called them on her broadcasts. All creatures made good use of these corridors, which if not pure wilderness were at least wildernessy, and it was easy to wax enthusiastic about their success while flying over them at five hundred feet. Critics of her program, and of assisted migration more generally, never tired of pointing out that she was just one more charismatic megafauna, like her favorite subjects, flying over the essential groundwork of lichen and fungi and bacteria and the BLM, all the complicated work of photosynthesis and eminent domain, where things were ever so much more complicated than she ever deigned to notice. Well, she had done her share of that work too, as anyone could find out by looking into her past; and now it was her time to fly.
Frans took the airship well out over the Atlantic, then turned left and flew north toward New York. At the intersection of New Jersey and Long Island the tiny gray stitch that was the Verrazano Narrows Bridge appeared, and north of that the great city quickly came into view in all its watery magnificence, visible as a patchwork under a light marine layer of white clouds. New York harbor was a very human space, no doubt about it, even though it too was an ecozone, the amazing Mannahatta Ecosystem. But the human element dominated it. Awesome; sublime; even refreshing, after the monotony of the eastern hardwood forest and the high plains. From her vantage the great harbor looked like a model of itself, a riot of tiny buildings and bridges, an intricate assemblage of gray forms. Lower Manhattan was water-floored, and just one small part of the big bay, but so densely studded with skyscrapers and bordered with docks that the old outline of the island was easy to see. Upper Manhattan remained above water and had become more crowded with buildings than ever, including many new superscrapers, the colorful shapely graphenated towers north of Central Park that thrust far higher into the sky than those in downtown and midtown ever had. This had the effect of making lower Manhattan look more sunk than it really was.
Amelia narrated the sights to her audience with the astonishment common to all Manhattan tour guides. “See how Hoboken’s been built up? That’s quite a wall of superscrapers! They look like a spur of the Palisades that never got ground down in the Ice Age. Too bad about the Meadowlands, it was a great salt marsh, although now it makes a nice extension of the bay, doesn’t it? The Hudson is really a glacial trench filled with seawater. It’s not just an ordinary riverbed. The mighty Hudson, yikes! This is one of the greatest wildlife sanctuaries on Earth, people. It’s another case of overlapping communities.” She swung the camera around to the east. “Brooklyn and Queens make a very strange-looking bay. To me it looks like some kind of rectangular coral reef exposed at low tide.”
Frans was bringing the Assisted Migration down over what remained of Governors Island, so she said, “The little piece of Governors Island still above water is the original island. The underwater part was landfill, made with the dirt they excavated when they dug the Lexington Avenue subway.” Nicole sent a text saying it was time to wrap, so Amelia said, “Okay, folks, it’s been great having you along, thanks all of you for traveling with me.” Her cloud numbers had been strong, averaging thirty-two million viewers for the duration of her trip, half of them international. This made her one of the biggest cloud stars of all, and among those focused on nature, absolutely the black swan megastar. “I hope you come back and join me again. For now, here we are coming in over the Twenty-third Street canal. I never know what to call them. They’re very particular in lower Manhattan about not calling anything a street anymore. It marks you as coming from out of town. But I am from out of town, so whatever.”
Frans floated them past the downtown skyscrapers and turned east toward the old Met Life tower. Already she could see the little gilded pyramid of its cupola, rising above Madison Square. There were any number of taller buildings around the bay, but it still dominated its immediate neighborhood.
Amelia called in to confirm her arrival. “Vlade, I’m coming in from the west, are you ready for me?”
“Always,” Vlade replied after a short pause.
Winds sometimes got fluky over Manhattan, but today she headed into a steady east wind of about ten knots. Looked like high tide in the city, water reaching up the big avenue canals almost to Central Park; at low tide the waterline would be down near the Empire State Building, now looming to her left. She had considered living there, its blimp mast being so much higher, but the old tower had become fashionable, and even though Amelia was one of the most famous of the cloud stars, she couldn’t afford it. Besides, she liked the Met Life tower better.
Frans and the mast took over, the airship’s turbines hummed, her gondola yawed and tilted, the hiss of expelled helium and air joined the various whooshes of wind and the general hum of the city, a susurrus of thousands of wakes bouncing off buildings, also boat motors, horns, the usual urban clatter. Ah yes: New York! Skyscrapers and everything! Amelia had been born and raised in Grants Pass, Oregon, and because of that she loved New York passionately, more than any of the natives ever knew enough to feel. The real locals were like fish in water, unaware and unimpressed.
The Assisted Migration’s hook latched onto the mast and the airship swung a little, and soon the tube of the Met’s walkway leeched up to her from under the eaves of the cupola and seized her gondola’s starboard door. The inner door opened and with a quick whoosh the air equalized, and she grabbed her bag and descended the inflatable stairs into the top of the building, took the spiral stairs and then the elevator down to her apartment on the fortieth floor, looking south and east. Home sweet home!
Amelia had a teeny kitchen nook in her closet of an apartment, but like most residents of the Met she ate her dinners in the dining hall downstairs. So after showering she went down to eat. As always the dining hall and common room were jammed, hundreds of people in the serving lines and crowded side by side at long tables, talking and eating. It reminded Amelia of tadpoles in a pond. Quite a few of them waved hello to her and then left her alone, which was just how she liked it.
Vlade was at his table by the window overlooking the bacino, sitting with a woman Amelia didn’t know.
Amelia approached, and Vlade introduced them: “Forty-twenty, this is Twenty-forty. Ha. Amelia Black, Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir.”
“Nice to meet you,” Amelia said as they shook hands. The policewoman said she had seen Amelia’s show. “Thanks,” Amelia said. “Appreciate you watching. When did you move into the building?”
“Six years ago,” Gen said. “I moved in with my mom to help when she got sick. Then when she died I sta
yed.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
Gen shrugged. “I’m finding out it’s not that unusual here.”
The cooks rang the bell for last call, and Amelia stood to go see what was still there. “That bell has become totally Pavlovian for me,” she said. “It rings and I’m starving.”
She came back with a plate of salad and the dregs from several nearly empty bowls. As she dug in, Vlade and Gen talked about people Amelia didn’t know. Somebody had gone missing, it sounded like. When she was done eating she checked her wristpad for cloudmail and laughed.
“What’s up?” Vlade said.
“Well, I thought I was going to be here for a while,” Amelia said, “but this sounds too good to pass on. I’ve been asked to assist another migration.”
“Like what you always do?”
“This time it’s polar bears.”
“High profile,” Gen noted.
“Where can you move them?” Vlade asked. “The moon?”
“It’s true they can’t go any farther north. So they want to move them to Antarctica.”
“But I thought that was melted too.”
“Not completely. They’ll probably be okay there, but I don’t know. You can’t just move a top predator, they have to have something to eat. Let me ask.”
She tapped her pad for her producer, and Nicole picked up immediately.
“Amelia, I was hoping you’d call! What do you think?”
“I think it’s crazy,” Amelia said. “What would they eat down there?”
“Weddell seals, mainly. We’ve done the analysis, there’s lots of biomass. There aren’t as many orcas as there used to be, so there’s more seals. Another top predator might help keep them in balance. Meanwhile we’re down to about two hundred wild polar bears around the whole Arctic, and people are freaking out. They’re about to go extinct in the wild.”
“So how many are you talking about moving?”
“About twenty to start. If you agree to this, you’ll take six of them. Your people will love it.”
“The defenders will hate it.”
“I know, but we plan to film you and release to the cloud later, and we’ll keep the bears’ location in Antarctica a secret.”
“Even so, they’ll harass me for years to come.”
“But they do that already, right?”
“True. All right, I’ll think it over.”
Amelia ended the call and looked up at Vlade and the policewoman. She couldn’t help smiling.
“The defenders?” Vlade asked.
“Defenders of the Earth. They don’t like assisted migration.”
“Things are supposed to stay in place and die?”
“I guess. They want native species in native habitats. It’s a good idea. But, you know.”
“Extinction.”
“Right. So to me, you save what you can and sort it out later. But not everyone agrees. In fact, I get a lot of hate mail.”
The other two nodded.
“No one agrees with anything,” Vlade said darkly.
“Polar bears,” Inspector Gen said. “I thought they were gone already.”
“Two hundred is like being gone. They’ll join the zoo-only crowd pretty soon, sounds like. If the zoos can keep them alive to a cooler time, it will be quite a genetic bottleneck. But, you know. Better than the alternative.”
“So you’ll do it?”
“Oh yeah. I mean, talk about your charismatic megafauna! Yikes.”
“Your specialty,” Vlade noted.
“Well, I like everything. Everything but leeches and mosquitoes. Remember that time the leeches got me? That was gross. But the shows that get the biggest ratings definitely feature the biggest mammals.”
“And they’re in the worst trouble, right?”
“Right. Definitely. Sort of. Although, really—” She sighed. “Everything’s in trouble.”
The outdoors is what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab.
said Fran Lebowitz
g) Charlotte
Charlotte Armstrong’s alarm went off and she jabbed her wristpad. Time to go home. Unbelievable how fast time went when you needed more of it. She had spent the afternoon trying to sort out the case of a family that claimed to have walked from Pennsylvania into New York by way of New Jersey; they told their story ignoring the various impossibilities in it, insisting they had done it without actually being able to explain how they had finessed the checkpoints and marshes, bandits and wolves—no, they had not seen any of those, they had walked by night, walked on water maybe, until lo and behold they were on Staten Island and getting picked up by a beat cop who asked for their papers. And they had none.
She had sat with them in the holding tank at Immigration all afternoon. They were scared. They truly did not seem to know where or how they had crossed in, although that was absurd; and yet people were absurd, so who knew. Could be they had just kept moving, night after night, one step at a time, like blind people. But they had one cheap wristpad between them, so probably their actual course could be reconstructed from that, as she had suggested to them. But the case was not so serious that the immigration authorities had yet subpoenaed their wrist. Privacy laws fought immigration laws, with public safety tipping the scales such that caution almost always ruled. In reality every case was a test. She had explained all that to them and they had stared at her. For them to have any chance, she was going to have to be their representative in the court system. That was how it worked, most of the time. She had seen it a thousand times; this was her job. Formerly a city job, now some kind of public/private hybrid, a city agency or an NGO or something, there to help the renters, the paperless, the homeless, the water rats, the dispossessed. Calling it the Householders’ Union had been aspirational at best.
Just as she was finishing with them and packing to go home, the mayor’s assistant, Tanganyika John, came in to ask if Charlotte could come over and help the mayor deal with an issue, great in importance yet vague in detail. Charlotte was suspicious of this, as she was of John, a supercilious woman, slender and fashionable, whose only job was assisting the mayor, meaning she was one of the defensive ramparts that the mayor erected around herself as a matter of course. The mayor had several people on her staff doing similar stuff, useful only to her reputation, while the city gasped and heaved for life under her. But oh well! The tradition of an imperial mayor was very old in New York.
Charlotte agreed with as much politeness as she could muster and followed John down the hall and up the elevator to the mayor’s administrative palace on the penthouse floor. There three assistants just like John asked Charlotte to help the mayor write up a press release explaining why they had to impose immigration quotas for the good of the people already living in the city.
Charlotte immediately refused. “You’d be breaking federal law anyway,” she said. “They’re very jealous of their right to establish these laws. And my job is to represent the very people you’re trying to keep out.”
Oh no, not really, they were explaining mendaciously, when the mayor herself breezed in to make the same request. Galina Estaban, beautiful in appearance, smooth in manner, arrogant in attitude, stupid in action. Charlotte was coming to believe that arrogance was a quality not just correlated with but a manifestation of stupidity, a result of stupidity. In any case here Galina stood, vivid in the flesh, making the same request as if because it came from her Charlotte could not refuse, even though they had been enemies for almost ten years now. Galina seemed to think frenemy was a real thing and not just hypocrisy; then again since she was a hypocrite, maybe that made the term real for her. In any case Charlotte quickly disabused her of the notion that a personal request carried any weight. Galina responded with something about defending the borders of the great city they both loved, et cetera.
“Defending the borders isn’t possible when there are no borders,” Charlotte said.
Galina frowned, even pouted. Well, it had gotten
her to the mayor’s office, this pouty cuteness in the face of resistance. Charlotte met it with a stony glare. Through the pretended amusement and tolerance that followed, Charlotte saw the glint in the eye that indicated this was yet another little jab in their long battle, a parry-riposte that would be added to all the rest. It was Galina who had dumped city immigrant services over the side. Public/private combine, worst of both worlds!
“We have to get a handle on this issue somehow,” Galina said, turning dark on a dime. “Pack people in too tight and there could be an explosion.”
“This is New York,” Charlotte said. “It’s a city of immigrants. You don’t get to pick how many.”
“We can influence the number,” Galina said.
“Only by being a thug and breaking the law.”
“Explaining why we need quotas is not being a thug.”
Charlotte shrugged and excused herself. “Don’t waste time on this,” she suggested as she left.
She stumped home on the skybridges, looking down at the busy canals. She had started walking to and from work after her excursion with Inspector Gen. Every day now she found irregular high lines of her own devise. The original High Line was underwater and in its third life as an oyster bed. The current array of skybridges ranged from boardwalks just above high tide to long catwalks at the fortieth and fiftieth floors. They were almost all clear plastic tubes, reinforced by graphenated composite meshes so light and strong that they could span four or five blocks. Before her walk with Inspector Gen, she had almost always taken the number four vaporetto to work and back, but the canals could be so jammed that often as she watched from a vapo she could see walkers on the boardwalks moving quite a bit faster than her. And presumably it would be better for her health, at least if her feet could handle it. Have to work up to a daily walk both ways; not sure if that would work, but trying it made her pay attention to herself in new ways. Skip that dessert and you don’t have to carry it home from work, thus you will hurt less! Pain as a spur to action; oh yes, certainly not the first time for that.