“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.
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.
This gave her the idea of making herself into a little airship within the airship. At first she couldn’t figure out how to access any of the helium on board, nor how to calculate how much of it she would need to float herself up to the bow. But it turned out there was a tall helium canister in the jumble on the bottom of the tool closet with her. Some kind of emergency supply, perhaps to top off a ballonet with a microleak or something like that. Rooting around, she also found a roll of large plastic trash bags, with ties around the open ends. If some of these bags were filled with helium, perhaps double or triple-bagged, and the open ends tied shut, and all of them tied together by a cord tied to her, so that the open ends were kept at the bottom of the now-floating bags, then presumably the bags would hold the helium like party balloons, at least for a while. And loft her.