by Paul Briggs
“No problem. After that, they started fighting back in different ways—running ads like ‘Is that a real diamond?’ They had guys going into their long, proud history, and traditions—‘My family’s been in the diamond business for generations! My great-great-great-great-grandfather burned three African villages and pulled a guinea worm out of Cecil Rhodes's taint! How can you do this to me?’—or whatever it was they said. But the more they tried, the more publicity they drew down on themselves—business practices, how they were treating diamond miners… Basically, the press said we were the underdog, the market said we were the hot new trend, and everybody said we’re helping save the earth. That's a pretty good position to be in.”
“Speaking of publicity, I’ve been meaning to ask you about the ‘Wear the Air’ campaign,” said Walt. “Tell us something about the creative process that gave rise to it.”
Symcox laughed. “That’s the nicest ‘What were you thinking?’ I’ve ever heard,” she said. “That had its origins in the bowels of our marketing department. The only thing I contributed to it was the suggestion that instead of hiring models, we look for celebrities who were willing to appear naked… for a given value of ‘naked’—strategically placed objects and all that. Got to admit, I wasn’t expecting the governor to volunteer.”
“Why celebrities?”
“I wanted the nudity to be a statement of power and confidence. I didn’t want them to come off as vulnerable or exploited or objectified or anything—I wanted them to look like they were there and naked because that was what they wanted. I tried it myself, but we didn’t use the photo because market research said it made people uncomfortable.” Walt nodded. This woman had the wrong face and body for that sort of thing. “The photo of Governor Morgan, on the other hand, went over quite well.”
Walt called up the image of the ad in question. Morgan was just sitting there butt naked in some kind of upscale lounge area, cool as a rock in a stream, working on a tablet like this was completely normal, legs casually crossed, tablet just high enough to keep her nipples out of view.
“Getting back to your experiences with regulatory agencies and what you said about them,” he said, “have you ever considered… I don’t know, joining the Libertarians? We could use a few good candidates for office.”
“I did go through a libertarian phase when I was younger,” she said. “I think most really smart people do.”
“Excuse me,” said Walt, a little sharply. “A phase?”
“Well, yes. See, nobody likes taking orders from somebody dumber than they are, and if you’re a genius, that’s almost everybody. But at the same time, we don’t want to rule the world, because we really are smart, and we know it would be too much work and not much fun. So we dream of a world where giving or taking orders in general just doesn’t happen very much.”
“Exactly! As little coercion as possible! Not forcing people to do things or pay for things against their will if there’s any alternative!” Walt stopped himself before he could launch into a filibuster. “So what changed your mind?”
“When I was sixteen, I tried to write a science-fiction novel. It was set a hundred years in the future and there were all these libertarian space colonies out in the asteroid belt, collecting volatiles while looking for valuable ore to refine and ship back to Earth. All the characters were looking for this… thing that was going to make somebody rich if they could find it. A MacGuffin, basically. And they’d form these little alliances among themselves while plotting to betray each other, and my hero was this slim, sexy, nerd girl who was really into inorganic chemistry…”
“This is sounding good,” said Walt. “I kinda want to read it.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, then. I didn’t get very far with the novel—I never even decided what the MacGuffin was. I spent more time designing the colonies than I did developing characters. The power, the docking facilities, the water recycling… this was the stuff I thought was interesting. Not so much the people.
“But that part—trying to design these places and figure out how they’d work—that was what really did it for me. Try to imagine a space colony run on libertarian principles. We’re talking about a place where every drop of water, every breath of oxygen has to be accounted for. You’d somehow have to monetize all that stuff. Meaning that anybody who went bankrupt would have to be kicked out the airlock.”
“Well, you wouldn’t necessarily have to go that far,” said Walt. “I mean, they’d have to leave, obviously.”
“Right. On a spaceship. Which would also cost money—cubic footage, food, water, air, the energy to transport the mass… whatever you’re using for money, you’d have to loan them some just to get rid of them. The more I looked at the system, the less sure I was that it could be made to work, and even if it could I wasn’t sure how many people would actually want to live like this.”
“But if people were expanding into space, then they’d be building new space colonies all the time,” said Walt.
“They would, but every one of them would be subject to the same restrictions as the old ones. An infinite number of prison cells isn’t the same thing as freedom.” Walt opened his mouth to interrupt again, but couldn’t think of anything to say.
“At this point,” Symcox said, “I asked myself—‘What’s the difference between the planet Earth and a space colony?’”
“It’s bigger, obviously.”
“It’s bigger, and things like water and air can’t be monopolized, but the most important difference from a human perspective is that the margin of error on Earth is a lot wider. Wider, but not infinite—in fact, it seems like we’ve already exceeded it. So what kind of philosophy only works in a world with infinite margin of error?”
* * *
For most of that evening, Walt found himself going over that conversation in his mind. He thought he’d done a passable job of defending libertarianism, but he hadn’t been up to his own standards. It was hard to talk to somebody whose mind just casually made giant leaps from the concrete to the abstract and back: Every one of them would be subject to the same restrictions as the old ones. An infinite number of prison cells isn’t the same thing as freedom. He supposed that was what an IQ of 210 got you.
And yet he couldn’t help but feel that Symcox, for all her brains, had missed the point. It wasn’t about trying to achieve the best possible outcomes, although obviously good outcomes were… good. Libertarianism was right. Walt was no anarchist. He accepted that there was a certain bare minimum of coercion without which human society wouldn’t function. The object was to get as close to that minimum as possible, and never to forget that it was a necessary evil. Never to stop looking for ways to lower it just a little bit further.
Figuring out how to make this work was the job of somebody smarter than himself. And, apparently, somebody smarter than Sandra Symcox.
* * *
Isabel looked at it once again. She walked all the way around it, not wanting to lose a single detail. After today, she would never see it again.
The house where she’d grown up. The off-white walls. The faded navy shutters. The roof with its patches of shingle that Pop had laid down himself. The little path to the dock where she’d walked thousands of times, keeping an eye out for bees the whole time.
The house where she’d grown up. Where she’d hidden inside on sunny days and rainy days. The living room where she’d listened to NOAA broadcasts. The kitchen where she’d helped Mom with dinner.
The porch where she’d played with Chelsey or Kristen, or where Sandy had taught her about science. The place under the porch where Major used to sleep during the summer, back when they’d had a dog.
Wherever she had gone—College Park, the Arctic Ocean, Louisiana—she had always had this place to come back to, if only for a visit. Until today.
Condemned. From the point of view of the state of Maryland, one less place to worry about. Isabel gritted her teeth and went back inside to get another piece of furniture to
put in the U-Haul.
The day had come to move everyone and everything out, and Isabel was feeling emotionally drained. Over the course of the last two weeks, she had used up all her tears. Also her profanity. She had left most of that at HCD in the form of messages that were at the absolute legal limit of what was permissible to say to another human being or institution without it constituting a threat. God damn it, why? A little understanding. That was all we needed. Just a little patience from the fucking state after a lifetime of paying our taxes and dealing with the DNR. She had punched the wall of her own apartment. As it turned out, she had punched the wrong part of the wall. Now there was a hole in the drywall a foot wide and she hoped her landlord didn’t find out about it.
A fair amount of stuff had already been sold online or in yard sales. The last thing in the house was the chest of drawers in Mom and Pop’s bedroom. Scott helped her get it down the stairs.
Or to be perfectly honest, she helped him get it down the stairs. Over the last couple of summers, the sun had tanned his skin and bleached his hair as light as Kristen’s, and he was at least as strong as Pop had ever been. Isabel was having a hard time reconciling the impressive specimen in front of her with the baby whose diaper she distinctly remembered changing.
Afterward, Isabel went through the house one last time, trying to ignore the smell of mold, making sure nothing valuable was in here. With no furniture, with nothing on the walls but wallpaper and none of Jourdain’s toys on the floor, the place seemed strangely impersonal. It was as if this house were an elderly relative that had forgotten she was family.
Kristen and Chelsey were in the front yard, doing a last check to make sure they had all Jourdain’s toys. The one good thing about this being such an unhappy day was that it let Chelsey be a little more lucid.
“How’s Hunter?” said Kristen.
“I think he’s doing okay.” Better than I am. It’s been almost a month—why is it so hard to get used to living alone? I’m not even that sociable.
“Where is he right now?”
“He’s in the Yukon.” Seeing the blank look on Chelsey’s face, Isabel added, “Just east of Alaska.” This probably didn’t help. Chelsey had been fifteen when she found out that Alaska was not literally in a giant box in the middle of the Pacific. One of the things Isabel appreciated about Kristen was that unlike Chelsey, she never let being book-dumb become a part of her identity.
“Are they doing that tree-planting thing?”
“Yeah. First, they have to check to see if the permafrost is gone. You can’t plant trees on top of permafrost—it lowers the albedo of the ground and warms it up. So Hunter’s job is using this machine like a big syringe to take samples of the ground.
“He’s also gotten a job in the camp kitchen, and they’re already saying good things about the food he makes. So… yeah. We kinda miss each other, but…”
“But now that he’s gone, you can get yourself a real man,” said Chelsey. “Or a woman.” Isabel almost didn’t hear that next bit. If Jourdain hadn’t been watching, she might have hit Chelsey right there.
“She didn’t mean it,” said Kristen, seeing the look on Isabel’s face.
“I know,” said Isabel. “I know.” She had met people—not all of them straight—who still thought bisexuals couldn’t be faithful, that no one partner could give them more than half what they wanted. That wasn’t true, but it rankled. Even leaving Hunter’s good qualities out of consideration, she had made him a promise and she intended to keep it.
Chelsey gave her a knowing look. “Spiny, spiny, porcupiny,” she said. “Personally, I wouldn’t have put up with that boy for one day.”
“Personally, you married Rod. So personally—”
Kristen held up a hand to stop Isabel, then turned to Chelsey. “If she’s bringing that guy up,” she said, “you’re not gonna win this one.”
“Probably not,” said Chelsey. Then she turned to Isabel. “But don’t you feel better now that you got something to be pissed off about?”
Even with mild brain damage, Chelsey wasn’t dumb about everything.
* * *
Isabel returned to her apartment, aching in muscles she hadn’t known she had. Every single piece of furniture in the U-Haul was now in the storage unit. Eventually she was going to have to fix herself some dinner.
Her armphone started playing “I Won’t Forget” and said, “It’s Kristen.” It turned out to be a video from the bow of the Mary Lynn, carrying Kristen and the rest of the family to the Hortons’ place in Smith Island. One of the advantages of having your own boat was that you didn’t have to drive down to Crisfield and wait for the ferry.
Kristen was humming something to herself as she kept her camera trained on Smith Island, a line of green between denim-colored water and the pale edge of the sky. It was beautiful. And unspoiled. And flat. And vulnerable. Moving from Tilghman Island to Smith Island was… as far as sea level rise and bluelining went, that old saying about frying pans and fires came to mind again.
One day it will be gone. And it will never come back. But not today.
And we’ll always have the cake recipe.
* * *
Mr. Wallachinsky wasn’t built for grand, sweeping gestures, but he was doing the best he could. He waved his short, stubby arms at the crystalline ceiling overhead with an expression of justified pride, then turned to Carrie.
“What do you think?” he said.
“I think we’ve all been thinking much too small,” said Carrie, looking around.
The city of Haifa hadn’t been building heat shelters. It was a heat shelter. On the surface, it didn’t look so different, except for the slightly greater prevalence of AC and emergency vehicles, and the occasional staircase leading to the tunnels below.
Where Carrie was standing was an underground tunnel connected to the old Carmelit subway. Within the crystal panels of the ceiling were embedded the ends of fiber-optic cables that led to the outside, where their other ends were kept pointed at the sun. The panels refracted the pure sunlight into interesting patterns that illuminated the space with a soft glow.
“Is this one of the emergency elevators?”
“Certainly. Try it.”
It looked like any other elevator, except for the crank attached to the wall next to it. Turning the crank, Carrie found it was surprisingly easy to raise and lower the car. Of course, it would probably be harder if the elevator was full of people—but not a lot harder. A hydraulic jack would let a much smaller woman than Carrie raise and lower a two-ton truck with her own muscles. This was not so different. And it would continue working no matter what happened to the power.
“All this is just the beginning,” said Mr. Wallachinsky. “We’re digging tunnels into the heart of Mount Carmel for extra storage space.” There was already enough room down here to shelter the entire population of the city for several days.
Looking at the map, Carrie could see how parts of the complex could be isolated from the whole in case of a disease outbreak. No terrorist would ever take out the whole place with one virus or neurotoxin.
Some were predicting that in a later century, disastrous climate changes would make the tropics and low temperate regions uninhabitable to humans and other mammals during the daylight hours of summer. If that was the future, Haifa was almost ready for it right now.
Carrie knew of no other nation, not even Saudi Arabia, that was doing such a thorough job of preparing for whatever disasters might come. Maybe it was just the effect of having gotten used to the idea of existential threats.
* * *
The thing about a country the size of New Jersey is that everything is within few hours’ drive of everything else. Leah Lemel, one of the locals she’d hired as bodyguards for this trip, was sitting beside Carrie as the self-driving car took them back to the hotel in Jerusalem.
Carrie had been to Israel once before, as a child. Her memories of the trip were vague to the point of uselessness. Certainly she hadn’t exp
ected to be seeing this much farmland. It was one hundred degrees outside and bone-dry, but the crops were still alive, kept going with desalinated water injected into the soil. Another five degrees and all the care in the world won’t matter. This country is at risk like everywhere else.
But while it lasted, it was worth appreciating. “It’s beautiful,” she said, forgetting she was speaking out loud.
Leah spoke up. “You could stay.”
“Hmmm?”
“Why don’t you stay here?” said Leah. “You and your family. In Israel.”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course. Why not?” She sounded perfectly sincere.
Carrie took a long look at Leah. The woman was in her early twenties, and looked to be not long out of the army. She wasn’t a big woman—about five foot four, maybe 120 lbs—but she was physically fit and had an alert and dangerous look that never quite left her. Even now, while she was talking, her hazel eyes kept glancing over Carrie’s shoulder or taking sidelong looks out the windows.
“I can’t just…” Carrie groped for words. “I mean, I’m an American citizen. I have some serious career plans that involve… well, being in America.” You fool, you must be the only person on the planet who doesn’t know I’m planning to run for president.
“You should move here anyway,” said Leah. “For your daughter’s sake. Or her children.”
“I know Israel’s doing as well as any country. Better than most, in fact. But I think the U.S. can do just as well. I want to help make that happen.”
“It’s not how well they do for themselves I’m worried about,” she said. “It’s how well they do for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“How long has your family lived in America, anyway?”
Carrie needed a moment to think. That was an unexpected question.
“Roger’s family lives in Scotland, actually,” she said. “But my father’s family moved to America from Russia around 1910 or so. And my mother’s family traced its start in America to Providence in the late seventeenth century. So to answer your question, we’ve been Americans for a very long time.”