She was coming around. She was still painfully cold, her skin mottled red on white in a kind of pinto or Appaloosa fashion, it probably wasn’t her best look, although it could possibly be taken as orgasmic or something; the water was hotter now, and she was feeling better and better. She had only been submerged in the canal for a couple of minutes, they said, so now the water on her skin began to feel kind of painfully hot, actually. Like burning hot. “Hey!” she said. “Ow! Hot! Hot!”
So they cooled it a bit, and slowly they brought her back to a safe temperature internally, and dried her off, and got her into some clothes borrowed or bought on layaway, or put-’em-on, as someone said it should be called. Layaway, put-’em-on, lots of laughs at this. A very friendly crowd. “You are all so nice!” Amelia said. “Thank you for saving my life!” And she burst into tears.
“Let’s get you home,” Nicole said.
When Amelia had recovered from her dunking in the canal, she got in the Assisted Migration and flew from New York to the northeastern coast of Greenland. On the triangular island of hills between the Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden Fjord (which had been a glacier before the First Pulse) and the Zachariae Isstrom Fjord (likewise) stood a rather spectacular city called New Copenhagen. Given the state of old Copenhagen many people said this city should just be called Copenhagen, acknowledging that the city had in effect been relocated. Back in Denmark people sniffed at this presumptuousness and insisted their city was just fine, that it had always been a watery place. On the other hand the idea that there was another Copenhagen on the northeast corner of their old colony was not actually very objectionable, and the truth was that as the two places had little to do with each other, the names were not important. There was a Copenhagen in Ontario too.
In any case, Amelia had visited New Copenhagen before and was pleased when Frans guided the Assisted Migration down to the long line of masts at the southern end of the city, where a short fjord cut north to the island’s center, giving the island and city the shape of a horseshoe. The docks of the city protruded into the iced-over fjord, and behind them stood the downtown. Its buildings were mostly in the Greenland style, steep-pitched roofs on cubical shapes painted in bright primary colors, lit by hundreds of brilliant streetlights, which turned the darkness of the northern midwinter into a space far brighter than the interior of any room. The concert hall at the apex of the U was an enormous cube set on one point, homage to the similar concert hall in Reykjavík, and a famous locus for the New Arctic movement in long-duration opera and instrumental music. Some pieces played in this hall lasted all winter.
When her airship was secured, Amelia took a bus to the head of the fjord, where the biggest pedestrian district was located. The brilliantly lit cobblestone streets, blown clear of snow, were nearly empty, but then again it was very cold, and the few people out were mostly hurrying from one building to another. Despite the warming of the Arctic, midwinter here was still frigid, and sea-raw, as in any other coastal town. It reminded Amelia of Boston.
Inside a pub called Baltika it was steamy warm and loud with people enjoying a Friday evening. Amelia’s local friends from the Wildlife Migrators Association had gathered there to commiserate with her over her disastrous voyage south, to drink the memory away, and to discuss new plans. Some of them had helped her in Churchill, and they were as angry as she was at the wicked reception her bears had gotten in Antarctica.
One of them, Thorvald, was not as sympathetic as the others. “Antarctic Defense League includes almost every person down there, and they’re way worse than Defenders of Wildlife. People are only down there because they really want to be there. It’s like here, but more so. They really believe in it.”
“I know that,” Amelia said sulkily. “So what? Antarctica is huge, and if a few polar bears were living in a bay or two down there, so what? They could have shipped them back north in a few generations or a few hundred years. Round them up when things get cold enough again up here, send them home. It was a refuge!”
“But we didn’t consult them,” Thorvald said. “And they’re very caught up in their idea of Antarctica. The last wilderness, they call it. The last pure place.”
“I hate that shit,” Amelia said. “This is a mongrel planet. There’s no such thing as purity. The only thing that matters is avoiding extinctions.”
“I agree with you. But they don’t. So, you needed more than just people like me.”
He stared intently at her, and despite his rebukes, Amelia began to get the idea that he was coming on to her. Nothing new there, but in the mood she was in, it was somewhere between a comfort and an irritation. She might take him up on it. She still felt chilled right down to the bone, days after her dunking. It wasn’t just that anyway. Something had to change. Although the style he was using, as if by being rude he could boss her into bed, didn’t appeal to her.
“So what should we do?” she demanded. “My friends in New York were saying that if I kept it secret I could move some bears down there on the sly.”
They all shook their heads at this. Thorvald said, “You can see every polar bear on Earth from satellites. The Antarcticans would see them too. And we don’t want to get any more of them killed.”
“Maybe if we made a deal with them,” Amelia said.
But they shook their heads at this too.
“They won’t compromise,” Thorvald said. “If they were the kind of people who would compromise, they wouldn’t be there.”
Amelia sighed gloomily.
Thorvald said, “Maybe the thing to do is find new places around Greenland. There should be some newly opened bays where polar bears and their prey animals will do well.”
“It’s too warm up here now,” Amelia said. “That’s the point.”
Thorvald shrugged. “If you’re saying global temperatures have to drop for polar bears to survive, you would need to pull about a thousand gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere.”
“So what? Couldn’t we do that?”
“If that were our main project, yes. You would only have to change everything.”
“Oh come on. Everything?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like that. It’s too much. So we have to do what we can. I mean, isn’t that what assisted migration is about?”
“Sure, fine. You need refugia in the hard times. But they are only stopgaps. You are the queen of stopgaps.”
“Stopgaps?”
“That’s what they are. Because in the long run, only a system fix will work. Until then, we try our stopgaps. We do what we can with the handouts of the rich. We try to save the world with their table scraps.”