grab was on a different scale. It was supposedly sanctioned by the relocated Canadian government in Edmonton, but that was a fig-leaf fiction. The US federal government in Denver intended to extract as many of the hundreds of billions of barrels of oil available from the bitumen as possible before the seas closed over it all, in not many years from now if the gloomier experts were right. The government’s purpose was to secure its own position in the short term, and have a basis for national recovery in the longed-for day when the flood started to recede. The damage already done to the ecology and environment and so forth was ruinous. But rich men in the right place, like Patrick Groundwater, were getting even richer. Patrick had never imagined he would find himself in such a role. But somebody had to do it, and he tried to fulfill what he saw as his responsibilities conscientiously. Such was the way of the world.
A gentle snoring told him Holle was sleeping deeply. He checked on her, covering her with her blanket a little more tightly, and made sure her Angel was switched off.
Then he went back to work.
In the morning Holle woke him up at six a.m., as usual. To his huge relief it wasn’t raining, and the summer sun was trying to break through towering clouds. By eight they had finished their room-service breakfast.
Despite Alice Sylvan’s protestations, he decided they were going to walk and see the sights; they had a couple of hours to spare before he was due to meet Nathan Lammockson at the city’s public library. Holle had spent most of her young life in gated communities. It would be enriching for her to see something resembling a functioning city. So he packed a bag with child-type essentials, tissues, a book, a couple of toys, Holle’s Angel, a water bottle. Holle wore a summer dress, and with sunblock on her arms and face and a pink hat on her head they were ready to go.
They set off with Alice’s team scattered around them, pushing through the early morning crowds down Tremont Place toward the 16th Street Mall. The buildings were marred by cracked glass panes and peeling paint, the green spaces given over to crops like potatoes and beans, and the trees had long ago been cut down for firewood. Few cars moved on the wide avenues-you saw tanks or armored vehicles more than cars-but the roads were full of pedestrians and cycles and rickshaws, pushing past long-disconnected traffic lights.
The Mall itself was a straight-line strip of shops, once a pedestrian precinct, with rusting tram lines and tree stumps. The shoppers’ trolley-buses no longer ran, but heavy vehicles from the Sheriff’s office and the police passed slowly along the road, occasionally barking instructions from bullhorns. Patrick was struck by how many military and security operative types he was seeing. He suspected that the Mall was being used as a control corridor, stretching through the Central Business District and maybe up to Lower Downtown.
The walking turned out to be relatively easy, with only a fringe of homeless camped under heaps of blankets and cardboard in the doorways, some families with children. Cops and Homeland Security on foot were checking the permit papers and biometric ID markers of the unresisting IDPs, making sure no more illegals had slipped into the city during the night. Aid workers handed out cups of beans, rice and hot water.
Some of the shops were still functioning. The food stores and restaurants sold local produce almost exclusively. In the other windows you saw rebuilt and repaired electronics, clothes and accessories, shoes and coats, even books, everything recycled or reclaimed from drowned cities. Patrick found the existence of the shops comforting, a sign that he was in a functioning city, a contrast to the chaos prevailing over much of the surviving country. But if any of the original character of Denver had lasted into the twenty-first century, anything of its origins as a western trading post, nothing had survived the great erasure of the refugee flows. Without buying anything, they walked on.
They came to California Street, and cut down to the Colorado Convention Center on 14th. This had been turned into a refugee processing camp, and long lines wound through the streets around it. The IDPs, from a distance, were gray clumps of misery, as they always were. The time for the meeting was approaching and, following Alice’s lead, they turned down 14th toward the civic center park. As they tried to cross Colfax Avenue, the main east-west artery through the city, they had to get through a cordon around the civic center, manned by police and military detachments.
Patrick led his daughter past the monumental buildings set around the park: the US Mint, the curving frontage of the City and County Building, and the public library where Thandie Jones was due to give her briefing. The Art Museum was particularly striking, and Holle stared at its angular geometric forms, like the abandoned origami experiments of a giant. But the thin metal panels were streaked and corroded, the windows boarded up, the billboards empty. The coming of the flood had frozen all Earth’s great cities at around 2015, save for emergency construction to cope with refugee flows, where it hadn’t drowned them altogether. That was a decade ago, and buildings like the Museum, neglected or co-opted for purposes for which they had never been designed, were showing their age.
Denver, as the largest city for a thousand kilometers around and a key junction for transport and communications, had been a significant federal center long before the flood. Since the capital had decamped here after Washington had flooded six years before, properties around the city had been requisitioned by the great departments of government. President Vasquez herself, the first three-term president since Roosevelt, had moved into the governor’s mansion. Patrick happened to know that much of the government’s business was run out of a more secure location, an old FEMA regional command center, a two-story bunker refurbished and revamped for the purpose. There were even embassies here, some from drowned nations, their flags hanging limp in the morning air. These struck Patrick as pitiful relics.
In this civic center, however, you had the sense of a great capital, the way Patrick remembered DC in the old days. People in suits bustled everywhere, many of them speaking into the air or with the characteristically absent expression of Angel users. Patrick imagined they were lobbyists and bureaucrats and staffers of all stripes, maybe even congress-men and senators. Patrick had a sense of the vast resources being poured into this place, that the city was the focus of huge energies and determination, a new refuge for the spirit of America and a base for the recovery to come. The President herself was in Denver. If you weren’t safe here, then where?
A brace of helicopters swept low overhead with a great clatter of noise. Holle squealed and jumped, excited.
Holle was enchanted by the State Capitol, an eighteen-story structure with Greek columns and rotunda and golden dome, gleaming in the watery morning sunlight. She skipped up the Capitol’s stone steps, counting them until she got to the eighteenth. Here the step was engraved, and she read with painstaking care: “ ‘One mile above sea level.’ Is that right, Dad?”
“That’s so, sweets. One mile up, right here.”
A gruff voice broke in. “Well, a mile less six hundred feet or so. They ought to make that plaque dynamic. Hey, George, we should get AxysCorp to pitch for the business…” A burly man, short, aged maybe mid-fifties, was coming down the steps toward them. His gray-flecked hair was shaved short to the scalp, and his fleshy nose and double chin were bright with sweat. His accent was British, London or Essex maybe. He was trailed by a couple of other men, one tall, composed, black, the other shorter, agitated. “Patrick Groundwater, you old dog. Good to see you again.” He stuck out a hand. “Nathan Lammockson.”
5
Holle stood in the middle of the circle of the four men, peering up.
Nathan introduced his companions. “George Camden, one of my senior guys in AxysCorp.” Camden, black, was slim, confident, apparently competent; he returned Patrick’s gaze. He wore a coverall in AxysCorp blue, with the corporation’s famous logo, the Earth cradled in a cupped hand, emblazoned on his chest. Like Patrick’s own Alice, he stayed silent and stood back, watchful.
“And Jerzy Glemp.”
Glemp, tubby, his greasy black hair speckled with gray, and with heavy old-fashioned spectacles perched on a thin nose, was nervous, intense, his palm damp. He wore a stuffy-looking suit. “Mr. Groundwater. I am pleased to meet you.” His accent was heavy, east European or Russian. When he smiled his jowls crumpled, stubbly. “I learned your name through Nathan. How you were one of those who expressed concern at the reaction of the
