by Paul Briggs
The one on the right stood up, the top of her head about level with Isabel’s lower lip. She had light-brown hair almost the same shade as Isabel’s, but cut short. She wore square-rimmed glasses and a black pantsuit. “Call me Gabrielle,” she said, shaking Isabel’s hand.
The other one was probably Hispanic, but with her hair dyed a shade of canary yellow that matched her long-sleeved dress. She just reached out instead of getting up, exposing enough of her arm that Isabel could see it was covered in tattoos of winding roses. “Lexi,” she said.
A deeply tanned guy with conspicuous earrings and a touch of eyeshadow stepped up. “I’m Tyler,” he said. “If Rome gets too fresh, just hit him in the face with a rolled-up magazine.”
“Ignore him,” said Rome. “He’s just sad ’cause he wants to have sex with me and I only think of him as a friend.”
“In your dreams, fool,” said Tyler. “Your ass looks like two postcards fighting under a blanket. If I tried to fuck it, I’d probably miss.”
“His mouth, on the other hand, is huge,” said Guilden—no, Gabrielle, thought Isabel. Keeping track of new people’s names is hard enough when somebody isn’t giving them cute nicknames too.
“But enough about my body parts, which apparently even the lesbians are obsessed with,” said Rome. “Tell us all about yourself, and what brings you to this assembly of the great and the good and these guys.”
So Isabel spent a few minutes introducing herself and explaining her connection to Sandra Symcox, while being repeatedly interrupted by Rome’s flirting or self-promoting or whatever it was he was doing. She wondered what the point was of bringing all these people to a party like this if they weren’t allowed to mingle with the really important ones. She also wondered why Carrie Camberg thought that what she really needed was an introduction to this guy. He was cute in his own way, and at this point Isabel really wanted to get busy with somebody, but he was apparently addicted to… on second thought, no, there wasn’t a drug on Earth that did this.
Isabel tried to keep the talk on the diamonds relatively short, since it didn’t seem likely that any of these people were prospective customers and she didn’t want to be a bore. Gabrielle nodded respectfully, Lexi looked unimpressed… actually, a lot of them looked unimpressed. Maybe it was because they worked for Morgan.
“I like them,” said Isabel, feeling strangely defensive. “I mean, I might not have the world’s greatest taste—”
“Well, I think they’re awesome,” said Rome, “and I do have the world’s greatest taste. Seriously, I tried everything I like and it all turned out great! What are the odds?”
“Heads up, guys,” said Tyler, gesturing at the coatroom. From somewhere beyond it, someone was tapping something against something or doing something else to make a ringing noise loud enough to get everybody’s attention. Only Sandy, or possibly the governor, would have dared do that in this crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Sandy, “from the bottom of my heart, thank you all for coming. There’s only one New Year’s Eve every year, and there are many events, many causes of equal worth. You chose to be here and to help this effort on behalf of our fellow Americans.
“Are we doing this just to be nice? Are we doing this to make us feel good about ourselves? Okay, maybe a little. But mostly we’re here because deep down, we know that our fates are intertwined with those of the least fortunate among us. We, and they, are all in the same country, all in the same world. And we here in this room are blessed to be in a position where we can be of assistance to others.
“Even for us, it can be easy to lose heart. From our lofty perches, we have looked down on a world fighting a losing war against chaos, dreading the day when it blights our own lives and fortunes. Some of us have already been affected.
“But the year is over, and here we are. This city, this nation, this world—still here. Stronger. Wiser. And ready to turn the tide of this war in the new year.”
As she listened, Isabel couldn’t help looking around her, seeing where she was and in whose company, and being overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all. Is this actually my life? A week ago I was trying to sleep naked in a hammock in a bedbug-infested firetrap in the middle of a FEMA camp. Now I’m here, wearing a big load of diamonds, doing this.
And six weeks ago my parents had a home. And three months ago I had a boyfriend. And four years ago nobody had ever heard of the Northern Monsoon. Isabel was starting to understand how that polar bear must have felt—swimming and swimming through an endless gray void, desperately looking for something solid, something reliable that wouldn’t melt away under her feet just when she was getting used to it.
The big difference was that she wasn’t hungry. In this world, that meant she was already ahead of the game.
It was 11:59 p.m. The last seconds were ticking away. Somewhere a few blocks away, the ball was dropping.
“To the New Year!” came Sandy’s voice.
“The New Year!” said Rome, a split second before everybody else.
To the New Year. May the next bunch of changes be for the better.
Where will the Northern Monsoon strike next?
* * *
Will Carrie Camberg’s presidential campaign
ever get off the ground?
* * *
Will Isabel and Rome have sex?
* * *
Yes, I meant Jerome Ross—
what did you think I meant?
* * *
If so, are we going to have to watch?
* * *
What is this “ShameList,” anyway?
* * *
When do we get to meet this “Martelle Sherman” person?
* * *
Or what’s-his-name, that brother of Rome’s?
* * *
And isn’t anybody going to give Walter Yuschak
a good swift kick in the junk?
* * *
And is this story ever going to get an actual villain,
apart from the frigging weather?
* * *
Find out in the forthcoming
Altered Seasons: Age of Consequences
This story began as a short timeline, called “The Day the Icecap Died,” in the “Future History” section of alternatehistory.com, where it won an award. The encouragement of that community inspired me to share it on my own Web site.
Information on how communities are already confronting rising sea levels came from the documentary Facing the Surge (2016) directed by Diogo Castro Freire, Jorge Castro Freire, and Martha Gregory.
Much of the information about the Old River Control Structure came from the writings of John McPhee and can be found in The Control of Nature (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1989). I am indebted to A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit (Penguin Books, 2010) for observations on community formation in time of crisis.
The carbon fee and dividend proposal alluded to comes from the Citizens Climate Lobby. If you’re curious, the details are these:
A fee of $15 per ton of carbon is placed on carbon-based fuels at the point where they become a part of the U.S. economy. This fee rises by $10 per ton per year.
The money from the fee is distributed to all U.S. households on a per capita basis.
A border adjustment would place a tariff on imports from countries that do not price carbon themselves.
PAUL BRIGGS learned to read and write when he was two, the same time he was learning to talk. He spent the next twenty years learning that nobody talks the same way they write, or vice versa.
He lives in Easton, Maryland, has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is the author of two middle-grade science fiction novels, Locksmith’s Closet and Locksmith’s Journeys. He is working on the concluding volume of the trilogy, Locksmith’s War. Paul has also written several short plays, two of which (The Worst Super Power Ever and The Picture of Health) have won awards.
Find him online at:
www.paulbriggs.com