Before the Great Panic, the mill had produced cornmeal and flour that was shipped across the country. But once the Canadians had dammed the rivers and the lower states began fighting over the trickles that remained, there wasn’t enough water for any industry, let alone something as water-intensive as milling. The snow masses and ice packs were gone, victims of warmer temperatures and higher sea levels. The aquifers and surface lakes had dried up or had been polluted. Forests were denuded, wetlands drained. Fresh, drinkable water was in the hands of a very few whose grip grew tighter as the world grew drier.
In truth there hadn’t been enough water for years. Our father told us the story they wouldn’t tell in school. Rain fell, but it couldn’t replenish what was gone. Growing populations made shortages worse. Although the planet was mostly water, less than one-tenth of one percent was drinkable. Riots broke out in the cities. Countries divided into factionalized republics. Wars erupted along their borders. In the aftermath hundreds of millions had died—most from disease and malnutrition. The Great Panic punctuated what men already knew but still somehow refused to accept: the world had run out of water.
“Where do you think the workers went?” I asked. “After the mill shut down?”
Kai shook his head. “There was nowhere to go.”
“The planes never bombed it.”
“They didn’t need to.”
He held out his hand to help me up. We continued climbing until we reached the entrance to the old mill. We knew it was the entrance, because part of a broken sign still hung above the ground. Otherwise we would not have recognized it. Wooden and steel beams blocked our passage, and a tangled mass of circuitry dangled from the ceiling like webbing.
Kai said the factory had so much power that the workers never turned off the lights and used the venti-units all night long, even when the buildings were empty. I already knew this from school, but I let Kai lecture me. He said water ran through the pipes that didn’t need to be filtered or treated; it could be drunk right out of the tap. This wasn’t entirely true. There were giant treatment plants that purified water and added chemicals like chlorine to kill bacteria. I had seen the holos in the archive. Still, things were safer then, and no one got sick just from taking a shower.
Kai held my hand the entire time he talked. Neither of us said anything about it, but I could feel his heart beating in the pulse of his palm. I wondered if this made me his girlfriend. When the girls in school got boyfriends, they usually wore a locket or an old article of the boy’s clothing. Maybe, I thought, that’s what the water was. I held tight to the empty bottle.
We threaded our way through the beams and wires. At each step Kai cautioned me to avoid a hole, a nail, a plank. Finally we emerged into the center of the factory floor. The old milling machines hunkered like animals, all rusted gears and broken parts. They had run on diesel fuel, which was refined and processed from oil sucked up from deep within the ground. But oil was too precious now to burn in a machine. These days it was rationed and used only to power tanks, jets, and the cars of wealthy men like Kai’s father. It was hard to believe oil had ever been so plentiful that people could burn it whenever they chose. But so many of the old ways were wasteful, like letting water spray onto the streets for no other reason than to run around beneath it on a hot day.
I thought about the other costs involved in milling grain. Not only were there oil and electricity for the machines, trucks, venti-units, lights, and refrigerators, but there was all the water to grow the grain in the first place. Millions of hectares of farmland were devoted to corn, soybeans, wheat, and rye. The government built thousands of kilometers of aqueducts that took water from rivers halfway across the country and brought it to the farms. There were places in the desert that suddenly bloomed with vineyards and orange groves. Towns without water were transformed into green paradises where people played games on tracts of perfect grass. Entire cities sprang from dust and clay, their spires reaching into the sky and their roots deep into the earth. They sucked up water as if it were their birthright and spat out sewage back onto the land. There was no limit to Earth’s resources—until there wasn’t anything left anymore.
We hiked over and around machines as big as trucks. In every building the windows were shattered, and the walls were scoured of anything valuable. Floors and ceilings had collapsed, and splintered trusses lay everywhere. Some of the interior offices were intact, but they were completely empty of furniture, paneling, and anything else that would burn. The copper wiring had been stripped away, and the machines had ben robbed clean of fuel for use during the cold winters that followed.