average size-rather short at that-with many fewer smalls and talls. Asian faces, African, European-everyone but Native Americans, as she always thought in Manhattan. Talk about invasive biology!
A building she passed had pumped out its old floor and now operated down there in a kind of big bathtub of air. She had heard that submarine and intertidal real estate was booming. Some spoke of pumping out the subway system, which still worked wherever it had run aboveground. Below her the slop of water threw up a big ambient sound. Human voices, and water splashing, and the cries of gulls back on the docks, and the rush of wind through the canyons of buildings; these were the sounds of the city. The water below was completely chopped up with intersecting wakes. Behind her, down the avenue to the west, mirrorflakes of broken sunlight bounced on the big river. This was the thing she loved-she was outdoors, truly in the open. Standing on the side of a planet. In the greatest city of all.
S he hopped down some stairs and got on a vaparetto going down Eighth Avenue. The ferry was a long low- slung thing, with seats for about fifty people and room for another hundred to stand. It stopped every few blocks. She hung over the rail and gazed up and down the canal: a river canyon, with buildings for canyon walls. Very Futurismo in appearance. She got off at Twenty-Sixth Street where it was bridged by a long esplanade, extending east all the way to the East River. Lots of the east-west streets had overhead platforms like this, and the crowded canals under them were shaded almost all day long. When the sunlight slanted through slots, it laid a bronze glaze on things, and the blue water turned pewter. The New Yorkers did not seem to notice this effect, but on the other hand, there were twenty million people living here despite the flood, and Swan thought that beauty was not completely irrelevant to the phenomenon, even if people chose to keep mum about it. Tough guys, it made her laugh. Swan was not a tough guy, and not a New Yorker, and this place was astonishing and she knew the locals knew it. Talk about landscape art! “ ‘The geography of the world is unified only by human logic and optics,’ ” she chanted, “ ‘by the light and color of artifice, by decorative arrangement, by ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful!’ ” You could sing Lowenthal’s entire oratio on the catwalks of Manhattan, and no one would care.
She moved into the sun whenever she could. That was the direct radiation of Sol, slamming into her naked skin. It was amazing to stand in the light of the sun without dying of it. This was the only place in the solar system where that could happen; the bioshell surrounding a star was as thin as a soap bubble. Thickening the life bubble- maybe that was the human project. That they had pulled the bubble out around Mars was a remarkable thing. If they pulled it inward to Venus, even more so. This, however, would always be the sweet spot. No wonder the mystics of this old world, stunned by all life’s changes. Metamorphosis suited Earth, and never stopped. The great flood had become a fortunate fall, had brought on an exfoliation into a higher state. The world had been watered. Flowers popping out of the leafy branch. She was back.
T he Mercury House was down by the Museum of Modern Art. Many of the museum’s paintings were now on Mercury, only copies left behind, and in an unusual gesture, a room here was devoted to Mercurial art. The Group of Nine was prominently displayed, of course. It was a little too much sun and rock for Swan. And she always found it odd to see canvas used as the medium, a bit like looking at scrimshaw or other antique exotica. When you had the world and your body as canvases, why deal in squares of wallpaper? It was peculiar, but as a result perhaps interesting as well. Alex and Mqaret had held a reception for the Nine once, and Swan had met many of them and enjoyed talking to them.
Up on the roof patio of the Mercury House building, maybe thirty stories above the water, she found a number of Mercurials gathered at the bar. Most of them wore exoskeletons or body bras, which, whether hidden by clothing or not, were evident to Swan by the way the people wearing them stood, resting comfortably slightly off true, as if in water. The ones without were more or less heroically erect, holding off the weight of the Earth with a strained look. Swan felt a little that way herself. No matter what you did, one g imposed itself on your attention for a while.
Their New York office was headed by an ancient Terran named Milan, who had a sweet smile for everyone. “Swan, darling, so good of you to come.”
“Oh my pleasure, I love New York.”
“Well, bless your ignorance, child. I’m glad you like it. And I’m glad you’re here. Come meet some of my new people.”
So Swan met some of the local team and endured their condolences about Alex, and gave them a brief inaccurate account of her trip to Jupiter. They had ideas about the Mondragon above and beyonds that they shared with her.
When they were done, Swan said to Milan, “Is Zasha still around?”
“Zasha will never leave this town,” Milan said. “You must know that. Haven’t you been to Z’s latest scheme? It’s on one of the Hudson piers.”
S o Swan took the ferry back up Eighth Avenue, got off, and climbed stairs until she reached a catwalk she could take west.
With all the old piers eleven meters underwater, a new set had had to be built. Some were old ones salvaged and stilted; others had been built anew, sometimes using the drowned ones as foundations. Smaller floating docks filled gaps and were attached to piers or nearby buildings at what used to be their fourth floors. Some of these docks were mobile and became like barges as they moved around. It was a tricky shoreline.
Some of the submerged docks now held aquaculture pens, and Swan’s old partner Zasha apparently now ran a pharm on one of these piers, growing various piscean drugs and bioceramics while also doing things for the Mercury House-and for Alex.
Swan had called ahead, and Zasha appeared at the fence that cut a floating dock off from the big plaza complex west of Gansevoort Street, at the south end of the High Line. After a brief hug, Z led her to the end of the dock and then out on the Hudson River in a boat, a smooth little hummer that soon had them midriver.
Everything on the water moved at a watery pace, including the water itself. The Hudson River here was wide; the entire city of Terminator would have fit in New York Harbor. Bridges were visible all over the place, including one on the distant southern horizon. There was so much water Swan could hardly believe it; even the open sea did not seem to have so much; and yet it was not even a very big river, compared to the really big ones. Earth!
Zasha was observing the scene with a contented expression. Banks of windows at the tops of the highest skyscrapers blazed with reflected sunlight, and all the buildings glowed. Skyscraper island: it was the classic Manhattan look, unlikely and superb.
“How are things with you?” Swan asked.
“I like this river,” Zasha said, as if it were a reply. “I motor up to the top of the island, or even to the Palisades, and then just float on down. Throw a line over. Hook the most amazing stuff sometimes.”
“And at Mercury House?”
Zasha frowned. “Spacers are getting blamed for a lot these days. The people down here are resentful. The more we help, the more resentful they get. However, their capital funds keep on investing in us.”
“As always,” Swan said.
“Yes, well, perpetual growth. But nothing lasts forever. The solar system is just as finite as Earth.”
“Do you think it’s filling up? Hitting carrying capacity?”
“More like investment return peak. But people may be feeling pinched by it. Anyway, they’re acting like they’re pinched.”
Zasha’s boat drifted in the ebb tide until it passed the Battery, and the view to the Brooklyn shore opened up. The skyscrapers at the foot of Manhattan looked like a cluster of giant swimmers, gathered knee-deep to charge into cold water. Between buildings the water sheeted like glass, and the canals were filled with little boats; the harbor bay too, although not as densely. At any given moment hundreds of watercraft were visible. They could see up both rivers, the Hudson and the East, and between those ran the smaller, straighter rivers of the streets, all under a cloudy sky. A Canaletto vision. Cloud reflections whitened the bay’s watery sheen. It was so beautiful that Swan felt like she had been cast into a dream, and she reeled a little with the boat’s rocking.
“Feeling the g?” Zasha asked.
“I am kind of.”
“Want to spend the night at my place? I’m getting kind of hungry.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
Zasha piloted the boat west across the river to a channel on the Jersey side that led west. It was hard to tell if it was a canal or a creek. Inland the waterway opened up to the north, and Zasha turned up that way and docked
