Ark

4

June 2025

It was raining in Denver, a steady, unrelenting downpour that fell from a gray lid of sky. It pinged off the wings of the plane that brought Patrick Groundwater and his daughter in over the city, and glistened on the runways and sculpted roofs of the terminal buildings as he carried six-year-old Holle through the international airport, discreetly tailed by Alice Sylvan and the rest of her security team, and hammered on the roofs of the cars that drove them through kilometers of suburban sprawl, crowded with IDP camps and welfare facilities, toward downtown. Under rusting junction signs the interstate was deserted save for police and government vehicles, and only a handful of private cars. To the west the mountain line was entirely invisible.

Patrick had visited Denver long ago, in his early teens, on his way to go skiing at Aspen. This was before the turn of the millennium, maybe fifteen years before the inception of the flood. He remembered the breathlessness, and today the air felt just as thin. Back then it hadn’t rained at all, save for a couple of intense storms which had been kind of fun, nothing like this steady, relentless downpour. But since those days the sea had risen two hundred meters from where it used to be, the air was full of heat and moisture, and you couldn’t expect to escape the rain even in the mile-high city. Well, Thandie Jones would tell Patrick and the other assembled mega-rich folk of LaRei all about that tomorrow.

All Thandie’s words wouldn’t deflect a single raindrop from his daughter’s head. But in Denver he hoped to meet people who intended to do something about it.

At the hotel they were met by smiling porters in galoshes and wielding umbrellas.

Patrick was reassured by his first impression of the Brown Palace. Set on a peculiar triangular lot where two street layout systems collided, it reminded him oddly of an ocean liner wrought of red granite and sandstone. Inside, an atrium towered up eight stories. While Alice completed the check-in formalities, Holle ran around the polished floor, pointing at the golden onyx pillars and lifting up her little face to peer wide-eyed at the filigree rails and the stained-glass ceiling far above, from which hung an immense Stars and Stripes. In a world that was slowly breaking down, you could rely on a church-like Victorian-vintage pile like the Brown to stand solid and comfortable where newer confections of glass and reinforced concrete were crumbling. Besides, it was only a few hundred meters from Denver’s civic center, where in the morning he was due to meet Nathan Lammockson and the rest of the LaRei people.

The suite Patrick was given had everything he needed to keep Holle happy, including a kid-friendly mini-bar, a net sack of books and toys, and screens with a variety of entertainments. There were tough notices about conserving water. Denver’s weather had always come from rain on the Rockies, and although the climate was a lot wetter now, the disruption to the rainfall patterns and the increased population made the freshwater supply chancy.

One TV screen was tuned permanently to a news channel, put out by the Rocky Mountain News, a defunct old print outlet revived as a broadcaster. Over a rolling tickertape of more or less dismal headlines, the channel showed images of the latest disaster, in this case a kind of limited civil war that had broken out around Alice Springs, Australia, as the residents resisted attempts by the federal government to relocate refugees from flooded-out Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.

Holle played before the TV, investigating the toys. She seemed immune to the bombardment of horrors on the news, just as the world’s various disasters had seemed unreal to Patrick when he was a kid in the long-lost twentieth century. Best not to hide stuff from her, he had decided. Holle’s life was liable to be shaped by bad news. He liked to think Linda would have backed up this intuition, but he was never going to know.

That evening he took Holle down to dinner in one of the hotel’s fancy restaurants. The waiters made a fuss of her as they elegantly served her a kiddie version of paella. It was a special request from Patrick, a kind of comfort food, a dish her mother used to make for her. Afterward, back in the suite, he played card games with her, and let her watch a couple of episodes of Friends on TV, and read to her until she slept.

Then he opened up his laptop and checked his e-mails.

The big construction projects up on the Great Plains were proceeding well, although disgruntled refugees being settled there bitterly called them “Friedmanburgs.” He referred that to his PR department for guidance.

Patrick was also involved in the furiously paced open-cast mining of the Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta. Oil, coal, gas and oil shale were already being intensively mined in Colorado, all over the Western Slope. The Alberta 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.”