His frown turned to irritation. “Like I said, we’re working for the people who own this building,” he said.
“So that would be?”
“The building’s managed by Morningside Realty.”
“But they’re just the broker. Who’s the owner? The mayor? Hector Ramirez? Henry Vinson?”
Always nice to see that look of surprise on people’s faces. Five minutes ago this guy had been thinking Gen was just a local cop. Now corrections and connections were going off in his head. Maybe he was recalling better the encounter with Gen on the boat downtown. She was citywide. She knew he had been working in lower Manhattan. A mutual process of discovery, here, that they both had larger briefs going in this town. And might therefore meet again, perhaps in a judicial venue.
Gen gestured at the couches, sat back down. This time the man sat down across from her.
“Not Vinson,” he said. “His partner from before.”
Now it was Gen’s turn to be surprised. “You mean Larry Jackman?”
The man nodded once, looking her in the eye. He was past his amazement. Aware he had shot through the Narrows now and been carried out into deep waters. Might need Gen as a pseudo-ally, somehow, somewhere. He had had his people stand down; he had answered questions when asked. No one had gotten killed out there by his people, hopefully. There was that to be said in his favor, such as it was. And it was not inconsiderable either. She nodded encouragingly, meaning to indicate that he could actually get out of this free of consequences.
The man said, with careful precision, “He put this building and some other assets in a blind trust when he started working for the government. He only communicates with Escher through third parties now. But we’ve been his security team all along.”
Gen was beginning to think that this night might not have been a complete fucking disaster after all, when the sound of gunfire erupted outside.
Everyone in the room was suddenly back on point. Gen surveyed the lobby, the little militia she was in here with.
“I’m gonna say we pass on that,” she said firmly. “We’re all staying in here. Whatever’s going on out there can resolve without us.”
“Really?” the man said.
“Really. Tell you what. Defend the building. From inside.”
“Defend it from who?”
Gen shrugged. “Whatever.” She took a look at her wristpad, it having beeped. “Ah,” she said. “Actually, it’s the National Guard.”
There is, in its enormity, a disproportion of effort. Too much energy, too much money. The fabulous machinery of skyscrapers, telephones, the press, all of that is used to produce wind and to chain men to a hard destiny.
In July 1931 a judge who was judging twenty-two hobos arrested for sleeping in Central Park gave them each two dollars and sent them back to sleep in the park. At that time there were shacks all over the park, all furnished with chairs and beds, seventeen of them with chimneys.
DeKalb Avenue was filled with celebrants; cars were surrounded and trapped as if in a flood. A large black policeman waded into the street, gamely trying to get everyone to disperse so traffic could get through, when suddenly someone lunged at him and hugged him. The crowd converged on him—suddenly everyone was hugging him, a massive pileup of love. He started laughing.
g) Amelia
The next day, July 8, 2142, Amelia Black floated down the Hudson River Valley toward home.
She had had a relatively good storm. Her tendency toward accident, as much innate as acquired, or thrust upon her, had thankfully spared her anything worse than being out on a flight when a hurricane was arriving. That had been stupid, sure, but she hadn’t been paying attention, hadn’t realized, et cetera. Once Vlade had alerted her to the situation, she and Frans had done the right things, all with her broadcasting the adventure to her audience in the cloud, which grew by the minute as people heard what she had gotten herself into this time. Amelia Errorheart has done it again, Amelia Errhard is in big trouble, Amelia Blank is blanking again, Amelia Airhead might not be able to read a map, ha ha, et cetera.
But from the moment Vlade had alerted her to the danger, she had flown the Assisted Migration north as fast as it would go, and although this top speed was only fifty miles an hour in still air, with a growing tailwind pushing her it had been enough to get her to the little town of Hudson, New York, which she called Hudson on the Hudson, where she was allowed to tie off on one of the blimp masts at the Marina Abramovic Institute, named after one of her heroes and role models. Once the airship was tied to that mast, its intense flailing became a natural piece of performance art, and at first Amelia had resolved to stay in the gondola through the hurricane—tie herself into a chair and get tossed around like a bull rider, like Marina herself doing one of her variously dangerous and awesome performances; she would be riding the storm! as she put it to her fans. But even with the spirit of their founder hovering over the institute and encouraging Amelia to go for it, the actual curators of the place had insisted that given the forecast, in this instance discretion was the better part of value, as they liked having Amelia there but didn’t want her getting thrashed to death witnessed by millions in the cloud. Marina would have done it, they conceded, but insurance prices being what they were, not to mention boards of directors, donors, and the laws against endangering children and the mentally incapacitated, it was probably best that she not commit suicide by hurricane.
“I am fully mentally capacitated,” Amelia objected.
“We’re not sure the fabric of your blimp will sustain one-hundred-sixty-mile-per-hour winds. Please don’t abuse our hospitality.”
“It’s an airship by the way.”
So, Amelia had with some difficulty gotten out of the gondola without getting crushed under it, and after that watched Frans ride out the storm, narrating the spectacle from inside the institute. Ironically, at the height of the storm the institute had had all its north windows sucked out in a single moment of extreme vacuum pull, so everyone inside had had to retreat, with a lot of shouting and even screaming, to the basement, while Frans and the Assisted Migration had negotiated the onslaughts with only a certain amount of deformative streamlining, being tied down by eight stout lines to eight strong anchoring points, also tied stoutly to a stout mast; Frans had worked hard to counteract the bouncing of the Assisted Migration by way of thousands of exquisitely timed counterthrusts from the airship’s various propellers. The airship still hit the ground repeatedly and then shot up and strained against the anchor lines, but both the smashes into the ground and the jerks against the anchor lines were constantly mitigated by Frans’s microbursting on the props, finessing the impacts with impressive panache. So Amelia would have been safer in the gondola than in any building whatsoever, another testament to the Assisted Migration, also to the principle of flexibility, of soft power and adaptation, so superior to rigidity and hard power, as she pointed out while narrating the admittedly still very dramatic images of the Assisted Migration shimmying like a shape-shifter under the storm’s wicked slaps. “If only wind were colored so you could see it,” she gushed at one point. “I wonder if we could set off some colored flares, or create a fog of some sort upwind of this place? It would be fantastic to be able to see the wind.”