Same to the right, but the Hudson was a cleaner, broader sweep of water than the East River and its shallows: a great blue searoad, crowded with watercraft but clean of ruined rooftops, with only the George Washington and Verrazano bridges crossing the great bay. Hoboken formed another dragonback horizon, cutting off the view of the immense bay filling the Meadowlands, punctuated at its south end by the fat towers topping Staten Island. To the north lay the north, a haze cut by the great river. The north was the place to get away to, but no one wanted to go. If you were really going to leave the city you would go up, and in fact above this office I knew Hector’s airship was tethered, a small skyvillage of the Twenty-one Balloons type. He could leave for heaven any time he wanted, and occasionally he did.
Now he seemed to be happy to see me. And I was definitely happy to see him. Boss, teacher, mentor, advisor: I had had several of each of these through the years, but Hector had been the first who combined all these roles, and so had become the most important of any of them. I had interned for him when I was too young to know how lucky I was, right out of Harvard’s lame business school, and he had taught me many things, but most usefully the art of swaps on social policy bonds. I had been working out evolutions of those lessons ever since, and now they were going to be crucial to surviving the intertidal meltdown.
“Push is coming to shove,” I said, pointing down the length of the aquatropolis. Midtown blocked our view of downtown, but he knew what I meant, and the immense sweep of the Hudson stood well for the coming fate of lower Manhattan. It was going to look like that.
“I thought recovery tech was getting stronger,” Hector said, to show that he knew what I was referring to.
“It is,” I granted, “but not fast enough. Mother Ocean can’t be beat. And it’s turning out to be toughest to fight her in the intertidal. Tide after tide, wave after wave—nothing can stand against that, not over the long haul.”
“So it’s made sense to short it,” he noted.
“Yes. As we know. But I’ve been thinking about what comes after.”
“Retreat to higher ground?” He gestured around him.
“Sure. Path of least resistance. Off to Denver. But some places will be different, and this is going to be one of them. It’s the myth of the place. People just won’t stop coming. It doesn’t matter that it’s a fatal shore. They want it.”
He was nodding. He had come here from Venezuela, he had told me, feeling the pull himself. Water rat, dime in his pocket, now here. “And so?”
“So, there’s a combination of new techs that add up to what you might call eelgrass housing. Some of it comes from aquaculture. Basically, you stop trying to resist. You flex with the currents, you rise and fall on the tides. You take graphene’s strength, and newglue’s stickiness, and fauxfascia’s flexibility. You put bollards in the bedrock, however deep that is, and anchor them to bands of fascia cord that would stretch with the tides and would always be long enough to reach the surface, where you attach a floating platform. You make the platform the size of your ordinary Manhattan block.”
“So it would be like living on a dock, or a houseboat.”
“Yes. And some of it can lie underwater, like in the hull of a ship. Then you link all the platforms, so that they move together in the tides, like eelgrass. Side bumpers where necessary, like boats have where their sides hit a dock. Eventually you’d have a floating mat of these platforms, a whole neighborhood of them.”
“You couldn’t go very high.”
“I’m not so sure. The graphenated composites are really light. That’s what has us up here so high. Anyway, it could go at least as high as it was before in that part of town.”
He nodded. “Can it be done?”
“All the tech is already available. And pretty soon all the stock down there is going to fall in the drink.”
He was nodding still. “Go long, my son. Go long.”
“I am. I will.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“Leverage. I want an angel.”
He laughed. “All right. I’ve been wondering what would come next in this town. It sounds very exciting. Count me in.”
So that was good. Really good. And I was still thinking hard about it as I put the bug back out in the river and let it drift downstream back to midtown. The problem that remained, in the here and now, was that I worked on derivatives in a hedge fund, and not in an architectural firm designing the next iteration of intertidal design. I couldn’t do that work from my position.
But I could fund it.
That meant finding people to fund. Of course this resembled what I was already doing every day, because finding something to fund was very similar to finding a good bet. Even though WaterPrice didn’t have much of a VC element in its portfolio, arguably it should; and finding the long to follow the coming short was wise for anyone. It was kind of like what I was trying to do with Jojo.
That got me wondering if I could let her know what I was up to, or even ask her for help with it—whatever might impress her more. If that was what this was all for. Which it was. At least primarily. But then it might be a case of the sooner the better, and asking for help a sign of mature vulnerability. I had the feeling she would like it, and I was impatient to tell her about it too.
So when the bug had drifted down to midtown I put in at Pier 57 and went to the bar where we had first met. It was a Friday again, just before sunset; and again there she was, regular as clockwork. What was with that? There was the same group, John and Evgenia and Ray and Amanda, and they all greeted me in a friendly way, Jojo too, as if nothing had transpired between us. Then again, Amanda and I were that way with each other, so it couldn’t be said that it was all that unusual for Jojo to be acting like this, cool and friendly, uninvolved. Dang.
Well, I got a drink from Inky, who was asking me questions about this very problem with his eyes, but I just rolled mine, to indicate all was less than well and I would tell him about it later, then went back to the gang. On the railing at sunset in December, air chilly, the river sliding brassily over itself in its ebbing hurry down to the Narrows. House band inside playing space blues, trying to soundtrack the view. The gang’s talk was the same, and again I was mystified: these people, my crowd, had a tendency to be crass jerks, and yet Jojo had been all happy-happy with them the day I met her, and now too. We both fit right in; so what did that mean? I had a cold thought: maybe she had claimed I lacked the altruism she liked in a man, just to give her a decent cover story for something more fundamental than… well, more fundamental than fundamental philosophies of life. That didn’t quite compute, but then again, I didn’t know. Probably it would in fact be easier to accept that she didn’t like my values than my smell, or my style of lovemaking. Which in fact she had seemed to like. Well it was just very confusing.
I tried to ignore that whirlpool in my brain and my gut, and eventually stood by her side, and there we were.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“It was good,” I said. “Interesting. I was talking with my old teacher from Munstrosity about trying to do something with all the fixes that people have been inventing to keep real estate from going under. You know, some kind of venture capital thing, sort of like what you were talking about before.”
She regarded me with some curiosity, and I tried to take hope from that, and not get distracted by the crystalline brown shatter of her eyes, the gorgeous eyes of the person I had fallen for so hard. Which was nearly impossible, and I couldn’t help gulping a little under her gaze.
“What did you have in mind?” she asked.