A lot of other buildings were following it down. I was reminded of those photos of drunken forests in the Arctic, where melting permafrost had caused trees to tilt this way and that. Chelsea Houses, Penn South Houses, London Terrace Houses, they all canted drunkenly. Not the slightest bit inspiring, in terms of investment opportunities. Recovery techniques were improving all the time, but there is no point to waterproofing a house built on sand. The graphenated composites and diamond sheeting are strong but they can’t hold slumping concrete, they’re more like very strong plastic wrap; they need support to work, they’re mostly waterproofing.
As I purred along the narrow canals between Tenth and Eleventh I caught sight of the Great Intilt Quad, up near the shore of the Hudson. Here in the first rush of skybridge building a group of investors had suspended a mall about forty stories above the ground, in the middle of four skyscrapers that anchored the skybridges holding the mall in air. This had thrilled people until the weight of the mall had pulled the four towers abruptly inward, dropping the mall five stories at once and breaking everything in it before somehow the towers held. After that people had gotten a lot more careful, and now the Great Intilt Quad stood there like a bad Stonehenge, reminding people never to hang too much weight outside the plumb line of a skyscraper. They were only built to hold up their own weight, as many engineers pointed out.
All these drunken buildings: how long could they last? In the eternal battle of men against the sea, which antagonist was winning? The sea was always the same, while improvements were being made in humanity’s ramparts; but the sea was relentless. And it might rise yet again. A Third Pulse was not out of the question, although big masses of ice at risk of sliding were not currently being identified by the Antarctic surveys; this was a finding factored into the IPPI. Anyway, wherever sea level went in years to come, the intertidal was always going to be in trouble. Anyone who tried on a regular professional basis to fight the sea in any capacity whatsoever always admitted that the sea always won in the end, that its victory was merely a matter of time. Some of them could get quite philosophical about this in a depressive nihilist way. Nothing we do matters, we work like dogs and then we die, et cetera.
So a time was going to come when all the weaker buildings in the intertidal were going to need major repair—if that was even possible. If it wasn’t, they would have to be replaced—if that could even be done!
Meanwhile, people were living here. Signs of squatting were everywhere: broken windows replaced, laundry hanging from clotheslines, farms on rooftops. Especially by day it was obvious. At night they would turn off their lights and their buildings would look abandoned, perhaps here or there candlelit for their ghosts’ convenience. But by day it was easy to see. And of course it would always be that way. Manhattan never had enough places to live. And you couldn’t make rents high enough to keep people away, because they dodged the rents and squatted wherever they could. The drowned city had endless nooks and crannies, including of course diamond bubbles holding the tide out of aerated basements. People living like rats.
This was probably what Jojo was hoping to ameliorate with her value-added investing. It was hopeless, really; even if you managed to do it, it would make you a kind of topologically reversed Sisyphus, digging a hole that always refilled, pumping out basement after basement only to have them pop, often lethally; then back to it again. Aeration! Submarine real estate! A new market to finance, and then to leverage, so that the cycle could repeat at a larger scale, as the first law demanded. Always grow. This meant that once the island’s surface was filled to the max, you first shot up into the sky; then when that effort reached the limit of the material strengths of the time, you had to dive. After the basements and subways and tunnels were aerated, no doubt people would start carving caves deeper and deeper, extending an invisible calvinocity down into the lithosphere, excavating earthscrapers to match the skyscrapers, buildings right down to the center of the Earth. Geothermal heating available at no extra charge! Apartments in hell: and that was Manhattan.
Except not really. One could think pessimistically when boating about in the abandoned ruins of Chelsea, trying not to look back at the furtive faces in top-floor windows and yet seeing the misery there anyway. But it was easy to clear one’s head of these dreary visions; just turn the bug and hum out to the great river and throttle up to hydroplane speed, lift off and fly, fly upstream and away, away from the wounded city. Fly!
I did that. The broad Hudson sheeted under me, its internal movements coiling and fracturing the dark surface. And there it was, standing around me on both sides of the river: upper Manhattan and Hoboken, both of them studded with skyscrapers taller than anywhere else, the two sides of the river competing for dominance by prominence, right in a decade when the revolution in building materials had allowed the construction of skyscrapers three times taller than ever before. And it still pleased the rich to stash away a billion or three in a skypartment somewhere in New York, visit for a few days a year, enjoy the great city of the world. No way Denver was ever going to match the view I was looking at right now!
I let the bug down onto the water with a ducky splash and headed in to the long dock floating under the Cloister cluster. The great complex of supertowers, each well over three hundred stories tall, loomed overhead like the visible part of a space elevator; it truly looked as if they pierced the blue dome of the sky, that they disappeared up there without actually ending. This effect made the sky itself seem somehow lower than usual, like a turquoise-blue dome in some immense circus, held up by a four-pronged center pole.
There was a line at the marina entry almost a dozen boats long, so I pulled up next to the cliffside that rose so steeply out of the river along this part of the island, to wait for the line to clear. The old Henry Hudson Parkway had been submerged by the river long ago, and the hack they had made in the hillside to hold that Robert Moses intervention was now underwater even at low tide, and home to a narrow long salt marsh, a flowing yellow-green surface carpeting the foot of the hillside, which was covered with brush and ferns and small trees, and studded with the island’s bossy gneiss outcroppings protruding out of the greenery.
I hummed slowly into the grass edging the salt marsh and turned upstream. Felt the bug’s starboard hydrofoil touch the bottom. It was near high tide. A quiet estuarine corner of the city, a little thoreautheater, cool in the shade of a passing cloud.