Homegoing

Chapter 16

The four lasting legacies of the twentieth century are radionuclides, atmospheric gases, toxic chemicals, and plastics—and plastics is the greatest of these. Ten billion transitory hamburgers are long since digested, excreted, and gone; but they have left ten billion immortal Styrofoam boxes behind. Plastics are generally light enough to float in water. So when nylon fishing nets are lost overboard by trawlers they drift eternally through the seas and kill fish as long as they hold together, which is forever. Coca-Cola jugs and shampoo bottles wind up in the oceans and bob onto all the beaches of the world. The Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble, but a plastic six-pack container will never die. Like diamonds, plastics are forever. For some members of the animal kingdom, this is good news. Jellyfish, for instance, benefit from the situation. The animals that feed on jellyfish are likely to eat a drifting sandwich bag by mistake and die of it, so the jellyfish survive uneaten and prosper. But it is bad news for seals, diving birds, turtles, fish . . . and people.

On the trip across the wide Hudson River to old New York Marguery was curiously silent and detached. Sandy hardly noticed. He was thinking hard himself—not, for a wonder, about whether he would get seasick again, although the river was rough at first, the river current flowing south to collide with the tide sweeping in to the north, but about what Hamilton Boyle had said.

“Would you like another sandwich?” Marguery asked, delving into the box she had brought.

Sandy saw that he still had almost all of the first one in his hand. “Not right now. Marguery? Do you think the Hakh’hli would do anything like that?”

“Blast our cities? I don’t know, Sandy. Do you?”

“No! It’s totally against all their principles, I’m almost certain.”

She nodded, but all she said was, “Finish your sandwich.”

Once they were out of the currents of the Hudson it was more like the pleasure trip it was supposed to be. The little inertial-drive motor purred reassuringly as they glided to a landing on what Marguery said was West 34th Street.

There wasn’t a “shore” to land on. The old shore was underwater. Buildings were on every side, and with them breaking the force of waves and current the water was placid. Often it was even so clear that, peering over the side, Sandy could see the bottom—streets, with abandoned cars and trucks and huge things Marguery told him were city buses.

They beached the little boat between two tall buildings, and the two of them pulled it up past the high tide mark. The sidewalk was littered with brightly colored scraps of plastic brought up by waves. When Marguery explained casually that they were leftover garbage from the old days, Sandy looked back at the water with distaste. “Do you actually ‘swim’ in garbage?” he asked.

“Oh, the biological stuff is gone long ago,” she assured him. “There’s nothing in the water that’ll make you sick. Not here, anyway. If you went a little farther south there are real problems—when the old nuclear power plants went underwater all sorts of nasty stuff soaked out—but that’s there. Now, do you want to go up to the top of that building?”

Sandy squinted at what she was pointing at, shrugging out of the funny orange “life preserver” Marguery had made him wear. “What is it?”

“It’s the Empire State Building,” she said shortly. “From the top of it you can see all around. Well?”

He stepped back as a gentle wave from the river came close to his shoes. “Oh, sure,” he said sourly. “We’re having fun, right.”

It was almost true. If it hadn’t been for his injured feelings it would have been wholly true, because certainly what they were doing and seeing was exactly the sort of thing he had dreamed of all his young life. He was right in the heart of the Big Apple! It wasn’t at all the way he had expected it to be, to be sure, but there it was, all around him. Overhead were blue sky and towering white clouds; all around them were the windows and facades of the buildings that had made Manhattan the first skyscraper city.

They were not alone. Back on the river, just a block away, other little boats, inertial driven like their own or puffing steam from their purring little hydrogen motors, were skittering about, filled with people on errands he could not guess. There was a great barge moored stem and stern between two buildings at the river’s edge, and cranes were lowering masses of objects into it: spaghetti strands of cable, office machines, lighting fixtures.

“They’re mining,” Marguery said briefly. “These buildings are full of useful things, and it’s all going to go to waste here if the water gets any higher. Which it probably will . . . The amount of copper those old people used! So we just take what we want while we can.”

“It looks dangerous,” Sandy offered, watching two men in a building far over his head leaning out to guide a descending bundle of what seemed to be metal rods.

“Well, it is, a little,” Marguery said. “A lot of those buildings are rotten at their foundations—the water has eaten them away. Every once in a while one falls. But you don’t have to worry about the Empire State. It was built for the ages!”

Staring up at it, with his head thrown back until his neck hurt, Sandy wasn’t as much concerned about the building’s falling down as he was about getting up to the top of it. He didn’t think it was much of a worry for himself; the muscles that had grown up on the Hakh’hli ship were ready enough to lift him a mere thousand feet or so. He wondered if Marguery could make it. When they entered there were water stains in the lobby. When he pointed them out Marguery nodded somberly. “When there’s bad weather you can get storm surges all the way in here,” she told him. “They’re getting worse, too; I guess we haven’t finished with the warmup. Come on!”

It turned out they didn’t have to climb all the way to the top of the Empire State Building. From the lobby they had four flights of stairs to go, passing stories filled with stacked materials and a whole floor of buzzing, whining electrical generators, hydrogen fueled and providing power to the floors above. There wasn’t any external electrical power in most of the city, Marguery explained, because the underground mains were now also underwater. But because of the generators they were able to ride in a comfortable elevator to the observation platform eighty-odd stories up.

No one else was there, and even if they had had to climb, the view would have been worth it. In spite of himself, Sandy found that he was entranced. He was gazing down at the whole human world! There was Hudson City to the west and north, across the wide span of river and bay; there was the almost-unbroken sweep of ocean to the south and east, punctuated with the few islands that had been heaped up in Brooklyn and Queens by the glacial drift ages earlier; there were the surviving lesser towers of old New York City, and the greater pair at what had once been the tip of the island. And there—he could see it plainly—sticking up from the middle of the great sweep of the bay was the body and upraised lamp of that most famous of heroic sculptures, the Statue of Liberty.

He said happily, “It’s great up here!”

Marguery didn’t answer. She was looking at a fixture in the ceiling, and when she looked back at him her gaze was clouded.

“Marguery?” he ventured.

She shook herself and glanced around. They were still alone on the old observation deck, though they could hear the hammering of a salvage crew only a floor or two below. She glanced at the fixture in the ceiling and then she seemed to make her mind up—about something, though Sandy could not tell what. She turned to him with an unexpectedly warm smile.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s really nice to be alone, isn’t it?”

Surprise made him scowl at her. The woman almost seemed to be giving him some sort of sexual signal! He cursed internally at the baffling rites of the human libido. What was he supposed to do? Should he throw his arms around her and do that right here, on the sundrenched observation platform of the skyscraper, with every chance that someone would step out of that elevator at any moment?

It almost seemed that he was. She had moved a step closer to him, still smiling. She had even bent her head toward him, so that her lips were no more than an inch or two above his own.

Angrily Sandy lifted his face to her and reached out for her. To his great astonishment, though she allowed his arms to circle her and even put her own around his neck, she turned her face away. She nuzzled his ear. When he tried to twist his face to hers she held tight.

He realized she was whispering to him.

It was only her breath that told him that; she was whispering into the wrong ear. He pulled back and said, “That’s the wrong one. The hearing aid is on the other side.”

She scowled, then quickly put the smile back on her face. She moved her lips closer to the good ear, and whispered again.

“Sandy. Don’t say anything. This is important. I’m going to ask you if you want to do something. Just say yes, and then we’ll do it. And don’t argue.”

He pulled away, perplexed, and was even more perplexed to see that she was smiling at him in a way even more overtly inviting than before.

“Ah, Sandy,” she sighed, caressing the back of his neck, “this place isn’t quite perfect, is it? Listen, hon. I know a neat place downtown—you’ll have to swim to get there, but we can work that out. What do you say? Would you like to find a more private spot, so you and I can get together?”

And she winked at him.

Sandy exhaled a deep sigh. Whatever was going on, it was sure to be interesting. “You bet,” he said, and then added, “Hon.”