“Years?”
“That’s right. Something like, I don’t know, seven years.”
Hexter and the boys stared at her.
“You stayed up here alone for seven years?” Hexter said.
Amelia nodded, feeling herself blush.
“Why?” Roberto asked.
She shrugged and blushed more. “I was never really sure. I wanted to get away. I guess I didn’t really like people. Some bad things had happened, and I just wanted to get away. So I did, and then I started doing the assisted migration stuff, and I found I could talk to people from up here, in ways that made them seem okay. I got used to talking to people again from doing it up here in the cloud, and then one time I came through New York, and the mooring at the Met was available, and I met with Vlade, up in the cupola, and I liked him. I felt comfortable around him. So then it went on from there.”
The guys contemplated this story.
“Does Vlade know the part he played in reeling you in?” Mr. Hexter asked.
“No, I don’t think so. He knows we’re friends. But people—I don’t know. They think I’m more normal than I really am. They don’t really see me.”
“We see you,” Roberto declared.
“Yes, you do.”
They talked about animals she had seen. She had a list somewhere, she said, but she didn’t want to get into that. “Let’s look for new ones now.”
They floated over the city. It was in every direction a great sheet of water, with some giant sticklebacked sea serpents eeling around the bay: Manhattan, Hoboken, Brooklyn Heights, Staten Island. Land lay in the distance everywhere, green and flat, except to the south, where the Atlantic gleamed like a dull old mirror.
“Look,” the old man said as he peered through one of the telescopes. “I think I see a pod of porpoises. Or could they be orcas, do you think?”
“I don’t think orcas come in the harbor,” Amelia said.
“But they look so big!”
“They do, don’t they. But we’re pretty low. Maybe they’re river dolphins, I know some were introduced here from China to try to keep them from going extinct.”
Cetacean backs in the water, smooth and supple, hard to figure because of their black-and-white striping. About twenty of them, rising to the surface and blowing like whales.
“Mr. Hexter, I think they’re Melville’s whales! They’ve come to get him!”
“Good idea,” Hexter said, smiling.
As they hummed north over the Hudson they could see that the waterline of the Jersey shore was still a bit icy.
“Shores like that are where we’ll have the best chance to see beaver or muskrat homes,” Hexter said, peering through his telescope. “Scan the shore there.”
The boys did that for a while, then looked through the telescopes down at the city. The docks were mostly back, centipeding Manhattan’s shores. The uptown towers flared emerald, lemon, turquoise, indigo. “Where’s your marsh?” Amelia asked.
“There by that skinny tall building,” Roberto said.
“Oh that skinny tall building!”
“Sorry. The purple one. Right east of it. It used to be a creek there, called Mother David’s Valley. It should make a good salt marsh, with maybe a couple of Mr. Garr’s raft buildings on it to study it and take care of it.”
“I’m glad you’re doing that. But don’t you have to be an adult to own property?”
“I don’t know. Anyway we’re a holding company.”
“I thought you were an institute,” Mr. Hexter said.
“You’re in it too! That’s right. The Institute for Manhattan Animal Studies.”
“I thought it was the Institute of Stefan and Roberto,” Hexter said.
“That’s just what you call it. I wanted to call it the Institute for Homeless Animals, but I got outvoted.”
“That’s because animals always have homes,” Stefan explained again.
“So is it true that these towers are mostly occupied now?” Amelia asked, diverting them from what looked to be an ongoing dispute.
“I heard that they are,” Mr. Hexter said. “The new absentee tax is pretty persuasive. Between that and the capital assets taxes, they’re either being occupied or sold to people who will occupy them. And I think a new city law requires low-income housing in all of them. Even the mayor is jumping on that bandwagon. I read that one floor of the Cloister cluster can be turned into rooms that house six hundred people.”
“How do they add plumbing for that many?”
“That must be all those exterior pipes.”
“They look silly.”
“I like them. There was something dreadful about those towers, their line was too clean. Better to add a little texture. More New York.”
“More sewage!”
“Exactly my point.”
“I like the clean lines,” Amelia said. “New York has always had clean lines.”
From their height, the people crowding the uptown sidewalks and plazas were the size of small ants. Theirs was a plentiful species.
“Can there really be enough apartments for all those people?” Amelia asked.
Hexter shook his head. “A lot of them come in for the day, just like always.”
“But a lot of them must live there too.”
“Sure. Packed in like sardines, as they say. Like clams in a clam bed.”
“I wonder why. I mean, it’s good for the animals that people want to do it, but why? Why do people want it?”
“It’s exciting, right?”
Amelia shook her head. “I can never get it.”
“You still like your blimp.”
“It’s true. You can see why.”
“It’s very nice. Are you headed out soon on another trip?”
“I think so. The Householders’ Union is asking me to make some kind of world tour. I’m just hoping it won’t lead to more trouble.”
“Angry landlords taking potshots at you?”
“Well yeah! I’m getting a lot of hate mail. I don’t like it. I wish I’d just stuck to animals, sometimes. It was easier then. I mean there was hate mail then too, but mostly from people who don’t like assisted migration, or animals, so I just ignored them. But now it’s people who, I don’t know.”
“It’s just landlords and their lackeys,” Hexter said. “Ignore them too. You’re doing great. You’re making a difference.”
Amelia asked Frans to head south just offshore from Manhattan, and they regarded the city in silence as they turned and floated by it.
Mr. Hexter pointed down at Morningside Heights. “It’s strange,” he said. “Down there is where the big riot last year happened, right? The battle for the towers. But it was also the crux of the battle for New York, during the Revolutionary War. The United States could have died before it was born, right down there, if it weren’t for that one.”
“What happened?” Roberto asked.
“It was early in the revolution. Washington’s army was being chased all over the bay by the British, who had lots of Hessian mercenaries in about a hundred warships. The Americans were nothing but farmers with fowling guns and rowboats. So wherever the British landed, the Americans had to run away. First from Staten Island to Brooklyn. Then when the Brits followed them to Brooklyn, the whole American army rowed across the East River one night in a fog. But then they were down in the Battery, where the town was in those days, and the British crossed the East River at midtown. They could have marched across the island and cut the Americans off and forced them to surrender, but their general Howe was extremely slow. He was so slow that people have wondered if he was trying to lose, so the Tories would be embarrassed back in Parliament, because he was a Whig. Anyway the Americans took advantage of this syrup-head and snuck up Broadway one night, past the Brits who were camped around the UN building, and they reconvened up here at the north end of the island.”