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.
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.