Amelia had a teeny kitchen nook in her closet of an apartment, but like most residents of the Met she ate her dinners in the dining hall downstairs. So after showering she went down to eat. As always the dining hall and common room were jammed, hundreds of people in the serving lines and crowded side by side at long tables, talking and eating. It reminded Amelia of tadpoles in a pond. Quite a few of them waved hello to her and then left her alone, which was just how she liked it.
Vlade was at his table by the window overlooking the bacino, sitting with a woman Amelia didn’t know.
Amelia approached, and Vlade introduced them: “Forty-twenty, this is Twenty-forty. Ha. Amelia Black, Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir.”
“Nice to meet you,” Amelia said as they shook hands. The policewoman said she had seen Amelia’s show. “Thanks,” Amelia said. “Appreciate you watching. When did you move into the building?”
“Six years ago,” Gen said. “I moved in with my mom to help when she got sick. Then when she died I stayed.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
Gen shrugged. “I’m finding out it’s not that unusual here.”
The cooks rang the bell for last call, and Amelia stood to go see what was still there. “That bell has become totally Pavlovian for me,” she said. “It rings and I’m starving.”
She came back with a plate of salad and the dregs from several nearly empty bowls. As she dug in, Vlade and Gen talked about people Amelia didn’t know. Somebody had gone missing, it sounded like. When she was done eating she checked her wristpad for cloudmail and laughed.
“What’s up?” Vlade said.
“Well, I thought I was going to be here for a while,” Amelia said, “but this sounds too good to pass on. I’ve been asked to assist another migration.”
“Like what you always do?”
“This time it’s polar bears.”
“High profile,” Gen noted.
“Where can you move them?” Vlade asked. “The moon?”
“It’s true they can’t go any farther north. So they want to move them to Antarctica.”
“But I thought that was melted too.”
“Not completely. They’ll probably be okay there, but I don’t know. You can’t just move a top predator, they have to have something to eat. Let me ask.”
She tapped her pad for her producer, and Nicole picked up immediately.
“Amelia, I was hoping you’d call! What do you think?”
“I think it’s crazy,” Amelia said. “What would they eat down there?”
“Weddell seals, mainly. We’ve done the analysis, there’s lots of biomass. There aren’t as many orcas as there used to be, so there’s more seals. Another top predator might help keep them in balance. Meanwhile we’re down to about two hundred wild polar bears around the whole Arctic, and people are freaking out. They’re about to go extinct in the wild.”
“So how many are you talking about moving?”
“About twenty to start. If you agree to this, you’ll take six of them. Your people will love it.”
“The defenders will hate it.”
“I know, but we plan to film you and release to the cloud later, and we’ll keep the bears’ location in Antarctica a secret.”
“Even so, they’ll harass me for years to come.”
“But they do that already, right?”
“True. All right, I’ll think it over.”
Amelia ended the call and looked up at Vlade and the policewoman. She couldn’t help smiling.
“The defenders?” Vlade asked.
“Defenders of the Earth. They don’t like assisted migration.”
“Things are supposed to stay in place and die?”
“I guess. They want native species in native habitats. It’s a good idea. But, you know.”
“Extinction.”
“Right. So to me, you save what you can and sort it out later. But not everyone agrees. In fact, I get a lot of hate mail.”
The other two nodded.
“No one agrees with anything,” Vlade said darkly.
“Polar bears,” Inspector Gen said. “I thought they were gone already.”
“Two hundred is like being gone. They’ll join the zoo-only crowd pretty soon, sounds like. If the zoos can keep them alive to a cooler time, it will be quite a genetic bottleneck. But, you know. Better than the alternative.”
“So you’ll do it?”
“Oh yeah. I mean, talk about your charismatic megafauna! Yikes.”
“Your specialty,” Vlade noted.
“Well, I like everything. Everything but leeches and mosquitoes. Remember that time the leeches got me? That was gross. But the shows that get the biggest ratings definitely feature the biggest mammals.”
“And they’re in the worst trouble, right?”
“Right. Definitely. Sort of. Although, really—” She sighed. “Everything’s in trouble.”
The outdoors is what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab.
said Fran Lebowitz
g) Charlotte
Charlotte Armstrong’s alarm went off and she jabbed her wristpad. Time to go home. Unbelievable how fast time went when you needed more of it. She had spent the afternoon trying to sort out the case of a family that claimed to have walked from Pennsylvania into New York by way of New Jersey; they told their story ignoring the various impossibilities in it, insisting they had done it without actually being able to explain how they had finessed the checkpoints and marshes, bandits and wolves—no, they had not seen any of those, they had walked by night, walked on water maybe, until lo and behold they were on Staten Island and getting picked up by a beat cop who asked for their papers. And they had none.