The grass of the marsh was almost entirely submerged at this point of the tide. Some kind of fluid eelgrass, flowing horizontally this way and that, pushed first downstream by the river’s flow, then upstream in the repeated slosh of boat wakes. The many grass stalks flowed in parallel, like hair underwater in a bathtub. Each green stalk had yellow chips crosshatching it, and as the flat mass angelhaired back and forth in the waves there was a lovely, mesmerizing sparkle of gold in the green. Back and forth the flowing grass flexed, sparkly and fluid. Back and forth, green and gold, back and forth, flow flow flow. Really very pretty.
And in that moment, watching this motion, just passing the time in a little contemplation of the river’s verge, waiting for the boats to clear the marina entry, I experienced a vision. A satori; an epiphany; and if you had told me flames were shooting out of the top of my head at that moment, I would not have been surprised to hear it. The biblically boggled ones had only been accurately describing the feel of when such an idea lances you. Luckily there was no one there to hear me speaking in tongues, or to interrupt my thought and cause me to forget the whole thing. No, I had it; I thought it through; I felt it. I wasn’t going to forget it. I watched the grass flow back and forth in the stream, fixing the thought with the mesmerizing image over the side of the bug. Really quite beautiful.
“Hey thanks!” I said to the dockmaster as he waved me into the marina. “I just had an idea!”
“Congratulations.”
I strode up the enormous broad stairs to the plaza that surrounded the Cloistermunster, the biggest tower in the cluster of four great supertowers that launched out of the hilltop. The Munster was built in the shape of a Bareiss column, meaning the bottom and top of the building were both semicircular, but with the semicircles oriented 180 degrees to each other. This configuration made all the exterior surfaces of the building curve very gracefully. The other towers of the cluster were also Bareiss columns, but with two for each tower, stacked vertically such that their midpoints formed matching semicircles. This arrangement doubled down on the lovely long curves rising up to puncture the sky. I crossed the plaza with my head canted back like a tourist, enjoying the architectural sublime, which at this point in my Day of the Idea was gilding the lily, but in a good way. Everything seemed vast.
Inside the Munster I took the sequence of ear-popping express elevators to floor 301, the top floor, where Hector Ramirez had his office, if that was the word for a room that occupied an entire floor of a building that big. A loft? It was a single semicircular space about the size of Block Island, glass-walled on all sides.
“Franklin Garr.”
“Maestro. Thanks for seeing me.”
“My pleasure, youth.”
He had not spoiled the impact of his perch with much in the way of furniture. Around the elevator core there were some chest-high cubicles, and some desks outside those, but beyond that lay an open space that extended to curving window walls to the south, flat glass to the north, the glass in every direction so clean it was hard to be sure it was even there. One saw the world.
To the south, the rest of uptown was a forest of superscrapers only a bit shorter than the Cloister cluster, each displaying its particular gehryglory. To the left of these towers lay the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, all three boroughs now bays studded with buildings, with Brooklyn Heights the first real land to be seen that way, topped by its own line of superscrapers. It was only from this distance one could see how tall the new towers really were, which was really very tall. Meanwhile water gleamed everywhere, filled with drowned buildings and bridges, ships and ships’ wakes.
Same to the right, but the Hudson was a cleaner, broader sweep of water than the East River and its shallows: a great blue searoad, crowded with watercraft but clean of ruined rooftops, with only the George Washington and Verrazano bridges crossing the great bay. Hoboken formed another dragonback horizon, cutting off the view of the immense bay filling the Meadowlands, punctuated at its south end by the fat towers topping Staten Island. To the north lay the north, a haze cut by the great river. The north was the place to get away to, but no one wanted to go. If you were really going to leave the city you would go up, and in fact above this office I knew Hector’s airship was tethered, a small skyvillage of the Twenty-one Balloons type. He could leave for heaven any time he wanted, and occasionally he did.
Now he seemed to be happy to see me. And I was definitely happy to see him. Boss, teacher, mentor, advisor: I had had several of each of these through the years, but Hector had been the first who combined all these roles, and so had become the most important of any of them. I had interned for him when I was too young to know how lucky I was, right out of Harvard’s lame business school, and he had taught me many things, but most usefully the art of swaps on social policy bonds. I had been working out evolutions of those lessons ever since, and now they were going to be crucial to surviving the intertidal meltdown.
“Push is coming to shove,” I said, pointing down the length of the aquatropolis. Midtown blocked our view of downtown, but he knew what I meant, and the immense sweep of the Hudson stood well for the coming fate of lower Manhattan. It was going to look like that.
“I thought recovery tech was getting stronger,” Hector said, to show that he knew what I was referring to.
“It is,” I granted, “but not fast enough. Mother Ocean can’t be beat. And it’s turning out to be toughest to fight her in the intertidal. Tide after tide, wave after wave—nothing can stand against that, not over the long haul.”
“So it’s made sense to short it,” he noted.
“Yes. As we know. But I’ve been thinking about what comes after.”
“Retreat to higher ground?” He gestured around him.
“Sure. Path of least resistance. Off to Denver. But some places will be different, and this is going to be one of them. It’s the myth of the place. People just won’t stop coming. It doesn’t matter that it’s a fatal shore. They want it.”
He was nodding. He had come here from Venezuela, he had told me, feeling the pull himself. Water rat, dime in his pocket, now here. “And so?”
“So, there’s a combination of new techs that add up to what you might call eelgrass housing. Some of it comes from aquaculture. Basically, you stop trying to resist. You flex with the currents, you rise and fall on the tides. You take graphene’s strength, and newglue’s stickiness, and fauxfascia’s flexibility. You put bollards in the bedrock, however deep that is, and anchor them to bands of fascia cord that would stretch with the tides and would always be long enough to reach the surface, where you attach a floating platform. You make the platform the size of your ordinary Manhattan block.”
“So it would be like living on a dock, or a houseboat.”
“Yes. And some of it can lie underwater, like in the hull of a ship. Then you link all the platforms, so that they move together in the tides, like eelgrass. Side bumpers where necessary, like boats have where their sides hit a dock. Eventually you’d have a floating mat of these platforms, a whole neighborhood of them.”
“You couldn’t go very high.”
“I’m not so sure. The graphenated composites are really light. That’s what has us up here so high. Anyway, it could go at least as high as it was before in that part of town.”