Vlade had spent ten years in the city’s water division, working on sewage lines, utilidors, subway tunnels, and aquafarms, mostly. So being underwater in one of the canals was about as ordinary to him as walking the streets uptown, or indeed more ordinary, as he hardly ever went uptown. The surface overhead surged slightly back and forth like a breathing thing. Opalescent sheen to the east where the sun was rising between buildings. Wakes crisscrossing, slapping against the Met and North, rebounding and breaking against each other, bubbles coming into being and snapping out of existence. A glimpse of the sun now, shattering on the water when he looked east along Twenty-fourth. All normal; but still he found himself creeped out. Something was wrong.
Just to be sure, he swam to the building’s northeast corner and shined his headlamp at the juncture of building and sidewalk, looking five or six meters on both sides. This was always a weird sight, with the goo that sealed the juncture of building and ancient sidewalk looking like congealed gray lava, and the sidewalk itself diamond-sheeted, even to a certain extent the old street surface. This was the weak point for every building still upright in the shallows of lower Manhattan; you could only seal surfaces so far out from the building, and beyond that they were permeable. Indeed one of the projects of city services was to caisson and pump out every drowned street in the city, about two hundred miles of streets all told, and diamond sheet every surface up to above high tide, before letting the water back in. This could only ever be partly successful, as of course there was already water everywhere down there below street level, saturating the old concrete and asphalt and soil, so they would be sealing some of it in while keeping the rest out. It wasn’t clear to Vlade that this would be particularly useful. Closing the barn door after the horses had leaked, as far as Vlade and many other water rats were concerned, but the hydrologists had declared it would help the situation, and so slowly it got done. As if there weren’t more pressing chores on the list. But whatever. Looking at the edge of the sealant and sheeting and the beginning of bare street concrete, now a canal bottom, Vlade could feel in his gut why the hydrologists had wanted to try something. Anything.
Inspection complete, he swam slowly back into the boathouse and clomped dripping up the steps, this time reminding himself of the creature from the black lagoon.
When he was out of the wetsuit, and had sprayed down his face and neck with bleach, and washed that off and dried himself and gotten back in his civvies, he called his old friend Armando from Lame Ass’s submarine services. “Hey Mando, can you pop over and take a look at my building? I got a couple of leaks.” Mando agreed to schedule him in. “Thanks.”
He looked at the photos on his pad, then turned to his screens and called up the building’s leak records. Also, after some hesitation, the building’s security cameras.
Nothing obvious. But then again, after checking his log: there was nothing recorded on the basement cameras, even on days when people had definitely gone into those sub-basement rooms, as recorded in the logs.
Often after a dive he felt queasy, everyone did from time to time; they said it was nitrogen buildup, or anoxia, or the toxic water with all its organics and effluents and microflora and fauna and outright poisons, the whole chemical stew that made up the city’s estuarine flow, my God! It made you sick, that was just the way it was. But today he felt sicker than usual.
He called up Charlotte Armstrong. “Charlotte, where are you?”
“I’m walking to my office, I’m almost there. I walked the whole way.” She sounded pleased with herself.
“Good. Hey, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like someone is sabotaging our building.”
Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe were the first artists in America to live and work in a skyscraper.
Supposedly.
Love in Manhattan? I Don’t Think So.
—Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City
La Guardia: I’m making beer.
Patrolman Mennella: All right.
La Guardia: Why don’t you arrest me?
Patrolman Mennella: I guess that’s a job for a Prohibition agent if anybody.
La Guardia: Well, I’m defying you. I thought you might accommodate me.
f) Amelia
Amelia’s airship the Assisted Migration was a Friedrichshafen Deluxe Midi, and she loved it. She had called the autopilot Colonel Blimp at first, but its voice was so friendly, helpful, and Germanic that she switched to calling it Frans. When she ran into trouble of one sort or another, which was the part of her programs that her viewers loved the most, especially if the trouble somehow lost her her clothes, she would say, “Oh, Frans, yikes, please do a three-sixty here and get us out of this!” and Frans would take over, executing the proper maneuver whatever it might be, while making a heavy joke, always almost the same joke, about how a 360-degree turn would only get you going the way you were already going. Everyone had heard it by now, so it was a running joke, or a flying joke as Frans called it, but also, in practical terms, part of a problem solved. Frans was smart. Of course he had to leave some decisions to her, being judgment calls outside his purview. But he was surprisingly ingenious, even in what you might have called this more human realm of executive function.
The blimp, actually a dirigible—if you acknowledged that an internal framework could be only semirigid or demirigid, made of aerogels and not much heavier than the gas in the ballonets—was forty meters long and had a capacious gondola, running along the underside of the airship like a fat keel. It had been built in Friedrichshafen right before the turn of the century and since then had flown many miles, in a career somewhat like those of the tramp steamers of the latter part of the nineteenth century. The keys to its durability were its flexibility and its lightness, and also the photovoltaic outer skin of the bag, which made the craft effectively autonomous in energy terms. Of course there was sun damage eventually, and supplies were needed on a regular basis, but often it was possible to restock without landing by meeting with skyvillages they passed. So, like the millions of other similar airships wandering the skies, they didn’t really ever have to come down. And like millions of other aircraft occupants, for many years Amelia had therefore not gone down. It had been a refuge she had needed. During those years there had seldom been a time when she couldn’t see other airships in the distance, but that was fine by her, even comforting, as it gave her the idea of other people without their actual presence, and made the atmosphere into a human space, an ever-shifting calvinocity. It looked as if after the coastlines had drowned, people had taken to the skies like dandelion seeds and recongregated in the clouds.
Although now she saw again that in the polar latitudes the skies were less occupied. Two hundred miles north of Quebec she spotted only a few aircraft, mostly big freighters at much higher altitudes, taking advantage of their absence of human crews to get up into the bottom of the jet stream and hurry to their next rendezvous.