New York 2140

a) Stefan and Roberto

Stefan and Roberto were subdued and even apprehensive on the day they joined Vlade and his friend Idelba on her tugboat. They had agreed to take Mr. Hexter, and that turned out to be a lucky thing, as with him along there was a certain amount of caretaking they needed to do. Without him they would have had nothing to do, and the whole point of their expeditions was to do things. But they were out of control of this one. And the stakes felt kind of high. It was hard not to worry.

Idelba picked them up on the Twenty-sixth aquaculture dock next to the Skyline Marina, and as her tug grumbled up to them the boys stared at each other round-eyed: her boat was huge. Out on the ocean they had not perceived that. Not containerclipper huge, but city huge, as long as the whole dock, meaning seventy feet long, and about three stories tall at the bridge, with broad flaring taffrails and a squared-off stern. “Wow,” Mr. Hexter said, peering up at it. “A carousel tug. And named the Sisyphus! That’s very cool.”

Idelba and one of her crew opened a passage in the side of the hull and lifted over a staircase on a hinge. The boys helped Mr. Hexter up it and onto the tug, then up narrow stairs to the bridge. Idelba appeared to have only one crew member aboard, a man who nodded to them from the wheel, which was set in a broad console at the center of a big curve of window. The wheelhouse. The view of the East River was amazing from this high up.

Vlade came up with Idelba after they had cast off, and the tug’s pilot, a skinny black man named Thabo, pushed the throttle forward and they shoved upriver. Ebb tide meant nothing to this brute, it had more than enough power to get upriver at speed. Given how heavy and squat it was, the speed was kind of awesome.

“No chance of hiding this baby,” Vlade remarked when he saw the looks on the boys’ faces. “We’re just going to have to sit there and be obvious.”

“People poke around the Bronx all the time,” Idelba said. “No one will give us a second glance.”

“Do we have a permit?” Mr. Hexter asked.

“To do what?”

“To dredge in the Bronx. Didn’t that use to be off-limits without a permit from the city?”

“Yeah sure. That’s still true. But my permit is good citywide, so if anyone asks, we’ll be fine. And the truth is, no one is going to ask. The river police have enough to do.”

“Both of them,” Vlade added.

Idelba and Thabo laughed at this. The boys’ inclination toward secrecy relaxed, and they began to feel more comfortable. Idelba invited them to go down to the main deck and wander around. Mr. Hexter said it was okay to leave him up on the bridge, so they flew down the stairs and ran around the deck to see the water from all perspectives, particularly the white V of their wake, curling away from the deep white trough behind their broad stern. The power of the motor vibrated their feet, and it was thrilling to feel the wind pour through them, especially after racing forward to lean over the bow and look down at the stiff bow wave skirting up over the brown-blue of the East River.

“This has got to be the most powerful machine we have ever been on,” Roberto said. “Feel that motor! Check out this bow wave! We are killing this river!”

“I sure hope we find something today,” Stefan said.

“We will. The signal was strong, and we were right on top of it. There’s no doubt about it.”

“Well,” Stefan said dubiously, “there is some doubt.”

Roberto refused to accept this, shaking his head like a dog. “We found it! We’re right on top of it!”

“Hope so.”

As they approached their buoy they spotted the snag it made on the surface and pointed it out to the adults up on the bridge. The tug cut back and canted to a new level, which left the bow distinctly closer to the water. After that they hummed on like more ordinary craft.

“There’s no way our buoy will anchor this beast,” Stefan pointed out.

“True,” Roberto said.

When the tug came up to the flaw on the river and they could see their buoy riding down under it, Thabo came down and pushed a fat button on the bow that apparently released an anchor, and it must have been a monster in its own right, because when it hit the bottom the bow lifted up again almost as far as it had when going full speed. The muffled rattle of the anchor chain stopped, and Thabo waved up to Idelba on the bridge.

“What if the anchor gets stuck down there?” Roberto asked Thabo.

Thabo shook his head. “She looking at the bottom with radar. She put it down someplace nice. Seldom a problem there.”

The Sisyphus floated on the ebb and then dipped in place, indicating that the anchor was holding them against the flow. Idelba cut the motor and then they were floating at ease, on anchor over their site.

“Man, I wish I could go down again!” Roberto said.

“No way,” Stefan said. “It wouldn’t do any good.”

“We’ll see what you got down there,” Thabo promised.

Idelba and Vlade and Mr. Hexter came down to the deck, and Vlade helped Idelba and Thabo deploy the dredge tube over the side. Vlade got Roberto and Stefan involved in moving the segments of the tube to the rear and latching them onto the long snake they were making. It was about four feet in diameter, and its nozzle was a giant circular steel maw, with claws like ice ax tips curving in from its circumference like marks on a compass rose. When they had about thirty feet of tubing screwed together, Thabo attached the nozzle end to a cable, then pulled it up to the end of a hoist arm by pushing buttons on the hoist mast. The boys helped crank the hoist around until the arm at the top had pivoted out over the water, taking the nozzle with it. Then Idelba let the nozzle cable down by pushing another set of fat buttons, and the tube and cable disappeared down into the murk, nozzle first.

“Here, come check this out,” Vlade said to the boys.

Idelba and Mr. Hexter were regarding a console that featured three screens. The tube and cable appeared on all three screens as a kind of snake dropping to the bottom, clear in the sonar and radar images, murky in the light of the underwater lights that Idelba had dropped on other cables, running off reels suspended over the side of the boat.

“Is that your diving bell?” Idelba asked, pointing to a conical shape on the bottom.

“I guess so,” Roberto said, struggling to comprehend the image. “I guess we left it behind after Vlade got me out of it.”

Idelba shook her head darkly. “Crazy kids,” she said. “I’m amazed you’re still alive.”

Roberto and Stefan grinned uncertainly. Idelba was definitely not amused, and Mr. Hexter was looking at them with alarm. Out there in the wind and sun he looked like he must have years before.

“We’ll move that little death trap out of the way and get the suck on,” Idelba announced.

She and Thabo worked their remote controls, manipulating the equipment in the murk as if they were down there seeing everything, if not perfectly, then at least well enough to bonk around and get done what they wanted. Vlade was helping them on the sonar and radar, obviously very comfortable with all the gear. Roberto and Stefan glanced at each other and saw they both were feeling far out of their league but still in their element. This was how it was done; this was stuff they wanted to learn. Mr. Hexter was leaning over them with his hands on their shoulders, taking in everything and asking questions about what they were seeing down there, and noting things he saw that they weren’t sure were really there, but it was cool. He was obviously into it.

Idelba used one of the nozzle’s hooks to lift the boys’ diving bell off the spot where Roberto had almost dug his own watery grave, as the old man put it. When that was placed well to the side, she returned the nozzle right to the red paint Roberto had put on the asphalt, which in the murky monochrome on the screens looked gray and ghostly, but that was okay, because now the nozzle’s hooks extended into the asphalt around the hole, and Thabo flipped a switch, and the grinding of the nozzle’s drill teeth cutting into the Bronx came out of their end of the tube with a sound they could hear in their guts. Stefan and Roberto looked at each other wide-eyed.

“That’s what we needed,” Stefan said.

“No lie,” Roberto said. “And to think we were going to hit it with a pick.”

“A pick you couldn’t even raise above your head without dinging the bell!”

“I know. It was crazy.”

“That’s what I kept telling you.”

Roberto grimaced and rubbed the screen of the radar as if that would clear the view of the bottom, now obscured by a flow of junk clouding the water.

Idelba said, “Gentlemen, the dredge is gonna start sucking up whatever’s down there. I’m aiming it at the metal you discovered, which shows on my metal detectors too, so good work there. It’ll get real noisy when I turn the vacuum on, and what comes up at this end we’ll run through sieves. We won’t be able to hear each other, so if you see anything come out on the deck, wave so I can see you.”

By now she was shouting, because the whine of some motor or engine far louder than the previous motor was now screaming from the deckhouse under the bridge. It was so loud that it seemed possible that the entire tug was filled with whatever machine was running there below the deck. The vacuum cleaner from hell! Now they all had to shout right in each other’s ears if they were going to hear each other, but as most of them had their hands over their ears, this wasn’t going to work either. Thabo dug in a locker and brought out big plastic earmuffs for them all to put on, and after that things were much quieter, but they could only wave at each other.

The boys stood with Vlade and Mr. Hexter at the upper end of the dredge tube, and when it began to spew mud and gunk into a big box on the deck, they leaned over the box and inspected the brown-and-black flow. The familiar stink of anoxia filled the air, one of the smells of the city, here at its nastiest. They all wrinkled their noses and continued looking. Mud flowed down and out of a big meshed hole in the box, into a channel in the deck where hoses added water to the mix, and everything ran down the channel toward the stern and out a meshed gap back into the river. Vlade put on rubber gloves that went up to his elbow, then a dust mask over his nose, and began to finger through the mud in the box. It was obvious he had done this before.

A black plume of mud blossomed off the end of the tug as the vacuuming proceeded. The anoxic stench was pervasive and ugly. After about ten minutes of this, Idelba flipped a lever and the noise ground to a halt. Thabo and Vlade uncoupled the last section of tubing and began rooting around in the last tube. They dug out chunks of God knew what, put it under the hoses running into the channel on the deck, checked out whatever was revealed when the coating of mud was washed off, and then casually tossed what they had in hand overboard. Usually it was lumps of concrete or asphalt, sometimes soggy wood, which they inspected more closely; other times broken stones, or chunks of what looked like ceramic. A goat’s horn, a complete furry body of a raccoon or skunk maybe, giant clamshells, a big square bottle not broken, a fishing gaff, a drowned doll, many broken stones.

When the tube was cleared they began vacuuming again. Idelba guided the nozzle at the bottom, the old man looking over her shoulder intently. It was hard to believe he could interpret the blobs on the screens, but he seemed as interested as someone who knew what he was looking at. The noise was again incredible. The mud flowing through the box had nothing in it of any interest.

Again the tube clogged, again they cleared it by hand. Most of what they washed off now consisted of rounded stones, often broken, frequently shaped like giant eggs. When the vacuum was off Mr. Hexter said to them, “That’s glacial till! Most of Long Island is made of this stuff. It was left here at the end of the Ice Age. Means we’ve reached the old river bottom, maybe.”

Idelba nodded as she poked through the muck. “Unless you hit bedrock, you’re always dealing with till. Nothing else around this whole bay, except a little scrooch of soil on the land and mud under the water. Or landfill of various kinds. But mostly it’s till.”

After another clog was cleared they went back to it, but before the vacuum began its whining and screeching and roaring, Mr. Hexter said to Idelba, “So will you be able to tell when you’re as deep as that metal you detected?”

She nodded, and they were back to it.

Two clogs later they suddenly found themselves sorting through old fragments of wood, squared off and lathed to something like spars or thwarts. Everyone looked at each other wordlessly, eyebrows raised, eyes round. Pieces of an old ship—yes, these seemed to be pieces of an old ship. Back to another round of vacuuming with renewed interest, no doubt about it. The boys were hopping around looking at every lump in the channel on the deck, mostly stone after stone, pebble after pebble.

Then in the middle of the glaucous cronking of the upsuck, and the huge whine of the vacuum pump, a big clunk stopped everything. Something had hit the last tube filter hard. Idelba turned off the vacuum pump. They all took off their earmuffs. Thabo and Vlade delinked the tube from the box, and they began to dig in the muck caught on the tube’s filter.

Against the big mesh they found a wooden chest with a curved top, about two feet on a side, bound by strips of crumbly black that had colored the wood adjacent to them. Vlade tried to lift it out by himself and couldn’t. Thabo joined him, then Idelba, and they hefted it onto the deck, dropped it with a thump. Stefan and Roberto danced around the adults, crawled between them, sniffed the dead stench of the wet muddy wood. It was the smell of treasure.

Thabo picked up a short flat crowbar and looked at Idelba. Idelba looked at Mr. Hexter. Hexter nodded, grinning widely. “Be gentle,” he said. “It should be easy.”

It was. Thabo tapped the shorter end of the L into the seam between the box’s top and its side, next to a black metal plate that must once have included the box’s handle and lock; now it was just a knobbly mass. A few wiggles, a gentle lift, a scrape. Thabo twisted the crowbar and levered it up again. The top of the box came up with a liquid scrunch. And there in the box was a mass of coins. Slightly black, slightly green, but mainly gold. Gold coins.

They all cheered. They danced around howling deafly at the sky. It was great to see that the adults were just like Stefan and Roberto in this, that they still had that capacity in them even though grown up.

“There should be two boxes,” Mr. Hexter said loudly in response to a look from Idelba. “That’s what the manifest listed.”

“Okay,” Idelba said. “Let’s dig around a little, then. They were probably near each other to begin with.”

“Yes.”

So even though the boys were hopping around slapping hands and hugging, the adults turned on the vacuum again, and they all had to get their earmuffs back on and go through it all again. It was crazy. Stefan and Roberto stared at each other with their Can you believe this? looks. But crazy or not, after a couple more vacuuming sessions there was another big clunk, now characteristic and obvious, and they stopped the vacuum, unhooked the tube from the capture box, and lo and behold, another wooden chest.

After that Idelba still continued to dig around for a while, amazing the boys further, and even Mr. Hexter. Vlade just smiled at them, shaking his head. Idelba was nothing if not thorough, his look conveyed. In one break to clear the filter again, he said to them, “She’s going to suck up the whole south Bronx, I’m telling you. Just in case whatever. We may be here all night.”

Then they heard some slighter clunks coming from the deck, and they began to find black cup shapes, rusted knives, and a couple more pieces of ceramic, all rolling around in the muck at the bottom of the box, or sliding down the channel in the deck. The smell was sickening but none of them minded. Everyone had their rubber gloves in the mud and water, washing stuff off under the hoses like prospectors.

After about an hour of that they stopped finding anything that seemed like it was part of a ship. It was back to stones and pebbles and sand—that same glacial till, the primordial stuff of the harbor’s shores.

Finally Idelba turned off the vacuum yet again and looked at the old man. “What do you think?” she shouted. They were mostly deaf at this point.

“I think we’ve gotten what’s there to get!” Hexter exclaimed.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

On the way back down to the Twenty-sixth dock, they all stood around in the wheelhouse talking excitedly about the discovery. Mr. Hexter inspected some of the coins and declared them the right kind for the Hussar to be carrying, as only made sense. They were usually half coated with a greenish-black crud, but where they had been touching they were a dull gold color, and Hexter brushed a few clean with a wire brush and declared they were mostly guineas, with a few examples of other kinds of coins. They gleamed in the bridge’s light like something intruding from another universe, one where the gravity was heavier. When they held a coin in their fingers and rubbed it, it felt like something twice as big at least, more like four times as big; the heaviness was very palpable.

“So whose are they?” Roberto asked, looking at Vlade.

Vlade saw the nature of his look and laughed. “They’re Mr. Hexter’s, right?”

“I guess so.” Roberto did not have a poker face, and his crestfallen expression made the others laugh.

“It’s right,” Stefan pointed out. “He’s the one who figured out where it was.”

“But you’re the ones who found it,” the old man said quickly. “And these fine people here dug it up. I think that makes us a consortium.”

“There’s a legal routine for this kind of thing,” Idelba said, frowning. “We use it sometimes down at the beach. We have to report certain kinds of finds to keep our permits good.”

None of the others looked happy about this, not that Idelba did either. Stefan and Roberto were appalled. “They’ll just take it away from us!” Roberto objected.

The adults considered this. It was obviously not unlikely.

“I could ask Charlotte,” Vlade said. “I would trust her to be on our side.”

The boys and Hexter nodded at this thought. As they slowed down to approach the dock, they were all frowning thoughtfully.

Before they reached Twenty-sixth, Thabo said something to Idelba, who called Vlade over to the scanning screens.

“Look, Thabo saw this while we were digging.” She tapped around and pulled up the screen shot she wanted. “This is our infrared, on one of the cables that we sent down with the dredger tube, so it’s seeing hot spots on the bottom. And look here—on our way back from where we were digging, there was a rectangular hot spot on the bottom.”

“Subway entry?” Vlade asked. “Those are still hot.”

“Yeah, it could be Cypress Avenue, right? That’s where it maps. But it’s hotter than most subway holes, and rectangular. It’s about the size and shape of a container from the old container ships. And see, the radar shows there’s a whole parking lot full of those containers a few blocks away, behind the old loading docks. It just makes me wonder if this is one of those. But down in the subway hole? And hot as it is?”

“Radioactive contents, maybe?”

“Christ, I hope not.”

“You don’t have a radiation detector on board?”

“Shit no.”

“You should. There’s a lot of crazy stuff in this harbor, you know that.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I should.”

“It’s not a case of what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

“I know that. Although I was kind of hoping it was.”

“Not. But yeah, this is weird. I’ll have my friends in city water take a look.”

“Good. You’re still in touch with those guys?”

“Oh yeah. We have poker night once a month, I usually make that.”

“Good. I’ll be interested to hear what they find out.”

“Me too.”

Roberto was still focused on the gold, so now he interrupted them. “What are we going to do with the treasure right now?”

Idelba and Vlade regarded each other.

“Let’s get it into the Met,” Vlade suggested. “Let me off at Twenty-sixth and I’ll sky over and get my boat, and we’ll take this stuff with us into the building and I’ll put it in the big safe. Then it’ll be safe while we figure out what to do with it. That could be tricky, now you mention it.”

“It was tricky before he mentioned it,” Idelba said. She looked at Thabo, who nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I know you’ll take care of us.”

Vlade nodded. “Of course.”

“We’re a consortium,” the old man said. “The Hussar Six.”

They agreed to that with handshakes all around, and Thabo turned the tug up into the flow of the East River and brought them up to the Twenty-sixth dock. The river and the city looked like something out of a dream.

b) Vlade

The next day Vlade paid a visit to his friend Rosario O’Hara, one of the old veterans of the city’s subway squad. In the years when Vlade had worked for her they had done all the usual subway work, which in those years included extending their operational reach into the drowned parts of the subway, slow work that mostly consisted of using the train tubes as giant water-filled utilidors, and laying within them things like conduit pipe for power lines, sewage pipes, tracks for robotic supply submersible capsules, comm cables, and so on, all the while keeping passage in them clear for maintenance access by city divers. The old Metropolitan Transit Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had long ago split up the old jurisdictions and responsibilities, but not in any sane way, and one thing happening in the sixty percent of the subway system that was underwater was an ongoing power struggle between the successors to the two agencies, which also created zones of dispute and uncertainty in which more informal alliances between working teams could be created. Thus Vlade had spent ten years of his youth working for the LMMTA, and had strung a million miles of submersible line during that time, among other more interesting chores. All that work had been done in teams, and there was enough danger involved to make the teams like family for the time they were working together; and that feeling persisted long after the work was done.

So he felt safe in calling on Rosario and asking her to meet on a taqueria raft outside the Port Authority’s building on the Hudson, where they could talk as they ate, sitting at the edge of the raft.

“Have you heard of the Cypress station being put to use lately? Anyone blowing it out and squatting down there?”

“Not that I’ve heard. Why do you ask?”

“Well, I was up there with some friends the other day, and their infrared caught a hot spot on the bottom, and it seemed to be coming from out of the Cypress hole, and I thought it might be heat coming up from that stairwell.”

It was a common signal; most of the drowned subway stations lofted plumes of heat up from the underworld. Submarine New York was a busy place. “I don’t think there’s anything going on there,” Rosario said. “It was industrial around there, as I recall. Parking lots for cars, containers, buses, pallets. Also that row of oil tanks on the old shore.”

“That’s what I thought. But this was a hot spot. I’ve got a feeling that something might be going on down there.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. There’s some people from my building missing, and some sabotage of the building too, and it’s made me spooky. Anyway I’d like to take a look. And I think it’s tricky enough I need to buddy-dive it.”

Rosario nodded. “Okay. Trina Dobson and Jim Fritsche okay with you?”

“Of course. Just who I was hoping for.”

“I’ll see when they’re available. How about you?”

“I can get free when they can.”

The group convened later that week at Eighty-sixth, a station on the number 6 line up to Pelham. Vlade had been worried about surveillance of the site, and Rosario had suggested they come at it from the side, as they might have done if it were one of their old work projects in the tunnels. Vlade liked that, and Trina and Jim did too; clearly they were all happy to have an excuse to do the stupid thing again. No one dove the tunnels for fun, but it was fun.

Eighty-sixth was one of the few stations on the 6 line to remain aboveground, and it gave them a place to gear up and check each other’s suits. Vlade and Jim had worked together in the old days, and Vlade knew Jim was a great diver; it was good to see him again. Trina was Rosario’s old partner. When they were ready, they clomped down the stairs and dove down to tube level, then got themselves arranged on the sides of a rail sled and sent it humming north.

Rail sleds moved through the black water of the tunnels much more slowly than the subway trains used to, but they were still much faster than people could have swum. Rosario had all the codes and the right to log on and take a ride. They had to make sure their time at this depth was short, in order to avoid having to decompress when they came up. So being able to catch a ride like this was good.

It was an eerie journey, a kind of submarine dream of an old subway ride, with all of them hanging on to the sled and exposed to the hard push of black water. They looked around in different directions and their headlamp beams fenced as they struck the tiled walls of the stations they passed through, making the walls gleam. The water in the tubes was clearer than in the rivers, and their lights hit the walls between stations and clarified the cylinder shape they were moving through. A weird sight, no matter how many times you saw it.

In half an hour the sled pulled them under the Harlem River and the Bronx Kill. Rosario stopped it in the Cypress Avenue station, and cautiously they swam up the black depths of the stairwell, the water getting murkier as they ascended.

There in the big room just under the old street level, they saw it: a shipping container, dark with crud, scarred by the lighter marks of ropes and hoist belts recently applied to its sides. It had been dropped down one of the holes that led up to the street level of old.

Vlade swam toward the container and scoped it with an infrared scope they had brought along for this purpose. Yes, it was hot. When he got close he stopped kicking and used his hands to wave himself to a stop. At one end of the container was an assemblage they all recognized, an inflatable airlock and tube staircase, covering the end of the container and standing out in the mucky surroundings because it was clean. These assemblages consisted of tubes attached to an adhesive airlock door. When the tube’s walls and its interior stairs were inflated, it would rise to the surface at about a forty-five-degree angle, where it could be opened at the top and any water inside pumped out, thus providing a dry descent to the airlock door, which could be glued to any kind of opening. A boat or dock on the surface could then grab the free end of the tube stairs and haul it up, and by using the stairs inside the tube, make a dry entry to whatever the bottom end of the tube was glued to. A standard piece of equipment all over the harbor, very familiar to them.

Rosario swam up to Vlade and spoke through their suits’ walkie-talkie system. “Check it out, there’s an air tank on the top, next to the airlock. Water units, air and sewage, the whole shebang.”

“Yep.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I’m going to knock on the side and see if anyone knocks back. If that happens I want to call the police, and stay here on guard until they get here.”

“We should have brought our water pistols.”

“We did,” Jim and Trina said, pointing to their swim bags.

“Deploy, please,” Rosario said. “Okay, let’s go. If this is a hostage box there’s sure to be sensors on it, so let’s go fast.”

Vlade finned hard to the side of the hot container. He tapped the old hello pattern: Shave and a haircut, two bits! Then put his ear to the side of the container.

After a few moments he heard taps back. Tip tip tip, tap, tap, tap, tip tip tip. A clear SOS. Maybe the only bit of Morse code left alive in the world.

“Call the police,” he said to the others.

Rosario swam up the old subway stairs toward the surface. She had radio comms in her swim bag and got the call off; they could hear it through their walkie-talkie system.

A police cruiser was over them in about fifteen minutes, though it felt longer. When the cruiser cut its motors, all four of them surfaced and explained what they had found.

The police officers aboard had run into situations like this before. They asked the divers to go down and pull the inflatable staircase tube up to them, which Vlade and Jim did. Then they attached an air hose to the tube’s valve and pumped it rigid, at which point it filled most of the old subway hole. After that they put a water vacuum in the interior cylinder and pumped it dry. Their vacuum was nothing compared to Idelba’s, but it was strong enough to quickly empty the interior of the staircase tube, which had been collapsed down below and was mostly dry to begin with. When it was cleared, two of the water officers descended into it, one carrying a welding gun and headset.

After that Vlade and the others floated by the boat, waiting. They couldn’t help keeping an eye out to see if other watercraft were approaching, though with their eyes right at the water’s surface their prospect was not good. They also swam back down from time to time to make sure no submersibles were approaching. This was something they could do that the police cruiser couldn’t (not optically, anyway), so after a while Vlade and Jim stayed down there by the container, looking around uneasily. Nothing came near them. They resurfaced when Rosario called them, and got there just in time to see the two water cops emerge from the floating end of the inflated staircase tube, helping two bearded men make their way up the stairs. Up in the wind the two men paused and looked around at the river, hands shielding their eyes, blinking like moles.

c) that citizen

Dark pools. Dark pools of money, of financial activities. Unregulated and unreported. Estimated to be three times larger than the officially reported economy. Exchanges not advertised or explained to outsiders. Exchanges opaque even to those making them.

Go into one and see what’s being offered in there for less than in the regular exchanges. Buy a lot of it and hope it’s what it was supposed to be, take it out and sell it at the list price. A nanosecond is a billionth of a second. Trades happen that fast. The offer on your screen is not in the actual present but represents some moment of the past. Or, if you want to say it’s in the present, there are high-frequency algorithms that are working in your actionable future, in that they can act before you can. They’re across a technological international date line, working in the next present, and when you offer to buy something they can buy it first and sell it to you for more. High-frequency trading algorithms can react to a quote faster than the public actually sees it offered at all. Any trade in the dark pools is getting shaved by a high-frequency interloper. It’s a stealth tax imposed on the exchanges by high-frequency trading, by the cloud itself. A rent.

Liquidity vaporized. Liquidity gone through the phase change that makes it a gas. Liquidity become gaseous, become telepathy. Liquidity gone metaphysical.

So because of this situation, much of the movement of capital therefore now happens out of sight, unregulated, in a world of its own. Two thirds of all finance, but this is an estimate; it could be more. Trillions of dollars a day. Possibly a quadrillion dollars a day, meaning a thousand trillion dollars. And some people, when they want to, can pull some of this vaporized money out of the dark pools and reliquefy it, then solidify it by buying things in the real economy. In the real world.

This being the case, if you think you know how the world works, think again. You are deceived. You don’t know; you can’t see it, and the whole story has never been told to you. Sorry. Just the way it is.

But if you then think furthermore that the bankers and financiers of this world know more than you do—wrong again. No one knows this system. It grew in the dark, it’s a stack, a hyperobject, an accidental megastructure. No single individual can know any one of these megastructures, much less the mega-megastructure that is the global system entire, the system of all systems. The bankers—when they’re young they’re traders. They grab a tiger by the tail and ride it wherever it goes, proclaiming that they are piloting a hydrofoil. Expert overconfidence. As they age out, a good percentage of them have made their pile, feel in their guts (literally) how burned out they are, and go away and do something else. Finance is not a lifelong vocation. Some small percentage of financiers turn into monster sages and are accounted wise men. But even they are not. The people hacking around in the jungle aren’t in a good position to see the terrain. And they’re not great thinkers anyway. HFM, the anonymous hedge fund manager who spilled Diary of a Very Bad Year, was a fluke, an intellectual working in a trade. When he understood, he left. Because there are very few ideas uptown. And even the great thinkers can’t learn it all; they are ignorant too, they bail on the details of the emergent situation, unknowable in any case, and after that they write or talk impressionistically. They are overimpressed by Nietszche, a very great philosopher but an erratic writer, veering between brilliance and nonsense sentence by sentence, giving cover for similar belletristic claptrap ever since. His imitators at their best end up sounding like Rimbaud, who quit writing at age nineteen. And no matter the pseudo-profundities of one’s prose style, it’s a system that can’t be known. It’s too big, too dark, too complex. You are lost in a prison of your own devise, in the labyrinth, submerged deeply in the dark pools—speaking of belletristic claptrap.

There are other dark pools in New York Bay, however. They lie under the eelgrass at the mouths of the city’s creeks, deeper than any algorithm can plumb. Because life is more than algorithmic, it’s a snarl of green fuses, an efflorescence of vitalisms. Nothing we devise is anything like as complex as the bay’s ecosystem. On the floors of the canals, the old sewer holes spew life from below. Up and down life floats, in and out with the tides. Salamanders and frogs and turtles proliferate among the fishes and eels, burrow in the mulm. Above them birds flock and nest in the concrete cliffs of the city, beneficiaries of the setback laws for skyscrapers that were in force between 1916 and 1985. Right whales swim into the upper bay to birth their babies. Minke whales, finbacks, humpbacks. Wolves and foxes skulk in the forests of the outer boroughs. Coyotes walk across the uptown plazas at 3 a.m., lords of the cosmos. They prey on the deer, always numerous everywhere, and avoid the skunks and porcupines, who stroll around scarcely molested by anyone. Bobcats and pumas hide like the wild cats they are, and the feral ex-domestic cats are infinite in number. The Canada lynx? I call it the Manhattan lynx. It feasts on New England cottontails, on snowshoe hares, muskrats and water rats. At the center of the estuarine network swims the mayor of the municipality, the beaver, busily building wetlands. Beavers are the real real estate developers. River otters, mink, fishers, weasels, raccoons: all these citizens inhabit the world the beavers made from their version of lumber. Around them swim harbor seals, harbor porpoises. A sperm whale sails through the Narrows like an ocean liner. Squirrels and bats. The American black bear.

They have all come back like the tide, like poetry—in fact, please take over, O ghost of glorious Walt:

Because life is robust,

Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism,

Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,

So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,

O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand,

Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,

Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.

d) Inspector Gen

Inspector Gen got a call from Vlade at around four that afternoon.

“Hey, we found those guys who were snatched from the farm.”

“Did you! Where were they?”

“Up in the Bronx. I was up there doing some salvage work when we saw a hot spot down in the Cypress subway station. So I went back with some of my old city sub friends and dived it, and got an SOS from people inside a container down there, and a police boat cracked it and pulled them out.”

“Really!” Gen said. “Where are they now?”

“At the police dock station at One Two Three. Can you meet them there?”

“Sure can. My pleasure. I’ve been worried about those guys.”

“Me too.”

“Good job.”

“Good luck, you mean. But we’ll take it, right?”

“You bet. After they’re checked out I’ll see if I can bring them home with me. Hey, do you think they can fit back in that hotello with the old man?”

“I can set up another one for Hexter, right next to theirs.”

“Sounds good. See you tonight.”

Gen made arrangements for a water launch and asked Sergeant Olmstead to come with her. She piloted the cruiser up to the police station at 123rd and Frederick Douglass, taking Madison most of the way north and using some police boat privilege to pop through the intersections.

At the station they found the two kidnap victims recovering in the infirmary. Two middle-aged men. They had already showered and were wearing issue civvies. One of them, Ralph Muttchopf—brown hair thinning on top, about six foot, hound-dog face, skinny except for a slight pot belly—sat in a chair drinking coffee, looking around with a wary expression. The other, Jeffrey Rosen—small, feral, triangular head covered with tight black curls—lay on an infirmary bed with an IV in his forearm. He was running his other hand through his hair and talking a mile a minute to the other people in the room.

Gen sat and inserted some questions into his nervous chatter. It quickly became clear they would not be able to do much to dispel the mystery of their disappearance. They had been knocked out by whoever grabbed them, probably some milk of amnesia involved, as they had no memories of the abduction. After that they had lived in their container, fed two meals a day, they guessed, through a Judas slot in their door. Rosen had gotten sick at some point and Muttchopf had left messages on their food trays telling their captors about this, and meals after that had included some pills which Jeff had taken. More memory confusion at this point suggested more milk of amnesia. They had never seen or heard anything of their captors.

“How long were we in there?” Jeff asked.

Gen consulted her pad. “Eighty-nine days.”

The two men regarded each other round-eyed. Finally Muttchopf shook his head.

“Felt like longer,” he said. “It felt like, I don’t know. A couple years.”

“I’m sure it did,” Gen said. “Listen, when you’re cleared medically here, can I give you a ride home? Everyone at the Met has been worried about you.”

“That would be good,” Jeff said.

Gen left Olmstead there to guard them, warning the sergeant and the cops on duty there to take care; it was at least possible that the kidnappers had stuck trackers in them and might try to grab them back, or worse. She ordered thorough scans for such devices, then left and piloted the cruiser back down to the Central Park north dock, and walked to the federal building behind the big police docks at Fifth and 110th.

By this time it was sunset, and the sunlight was lancing through the great towers to the west, silhouetting them like a dragon’s back against a bronze sky. Gen walked into the fed building, got through security, and went to the office where the federal department of immigration, the FBI, the NYPD, and the Householders’ Union had combined to create a human smuggling task force. Here she found an old acquaintance from her first days in the force, Goran Rajan, who greeted her cheerfully and poured her a cup of tea.

Gen described the situation with her two rescued ones.

“Only two?” Goran repeated.

“That’s right.”

“And they were kept for eighty-nine days?”

“That’s right.”

Goran shook his head. “So this isn’t smuggling, it’s some kind of kidnapping. Was a ransom demanded at any point?”

“Nothing. No one involved seems to know why it happened.”

“Not the victims?”

“Well, I haven’t debriefed them fully yet. They lived in my building and were abducted from it, so I’ve been taking a personal interest. I’ll give them a ride home tonight and ask more questions.”

“Good that you take this over. Because we often find a hundred people in one of those containers. Your guys are not really in our realm.”

“I understand, but I was hoping you would check through your harbor surveillance data and see if you can spot anyone visiting this container to feed these guys. It was probably twice-daily visits.”

Goran sipped tea. “I can try. If they were coming from the surface, we’ll probably see it. If it was being done by robot subs, less likely.”

“How many cameras do you have deployed now?”

“It’s a few million. The limiting factor these days is the analysis. I’ll try to figure out some questions and see what I find.”

“Thanks,” Gen said.

“Remember, the kidnappers will know their hostages are gone. They’ll probably leave the area.”

“That might not be a bad thing,” Gen said.

“No. May I ask if you are expecting me to find anything in particular?”

“I’ve been finding stuff that makes me wonder about Pinscher Pinkerton.”

“Okay. They’re big. They have all the drones and subs you’d need to do the visits automatically. It’s possible this whole procedure was done remotely.”

“Still, you might at least see the drones.” Gen finished her tea and rose to leave. “Thanks, Goran. When can I expect a report?”

“Soon. The computers answer the moment you finish your question. So it’s a matter of having the questions to ask.”

Gen thanked him and went back to her cruiser and headed back to the Frederick Douglass station. There she found Muttchopf and Rosen ready to leave, and she and Olmstead escorted them onto the cruiser and headed down the East River toward home.

The two men sat in chairs on the bridge beside Gen as she stood piloting, looking at the city like tourists. The tallest towers behind them still reflected some of the glow of twilight, though it was night overhead, the clouds a noctilucent pink. The lights of the dusky city bounced and shattered in the wakes on the water.

“You must be kind of blown away,” Gen supposed. “Three months is a long time to be locked up.”

The two men nodded.

“It was a sensory deprivation tank,” Rosen said. “And now this.”

Muttchopf nodded. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “The city.”

“It’s cold,” Jeff added, shivering. “But it smells good.”

“It smells like dinner,” Muttchopf declared. “A New York seafood dinner.”

“Low tide,” Gen pointed out. “But we’ll get you something to eat when we get home.”

“That sounds good,” Rosen said. “Finally. I’m finally beginning to get my appetite back.”

At the Met they got off on the dock, and Gen had Olmstead run the cruiser back to the station. Vlade greeted them, and he and Gen escorted the two men to the dining hall. They were weak. In the dining hall they were offered the chance to sit and be served, but both of them wanted to go through the serving line and choose their food. They heaped their plates high, and poured themselves glasses of the Flatiron’s red, and as they ate and drank, Gen sat across from them asking questions about the night of their abduction. They nodded, shook their heads, shrugged, said little; then, with a look around, Muttchopf said to her, “How about you come up with us to our place when we’re done here.”

She nodded and waited for them to finish.

Eventually they said they were stuffed, and Jeff was looking sleepy. They took the elevator up to the farm floor and went to the southeast corner. There they found two hotellos, a smaller one next to the larger one. Mr. Hexter came out to greet his new neighbors. The two men shook hands with him politely, but clearly they were beat.

They ducked into their hotello and looked around dumbly.

“Home sweet home,” Rosen said, and went immediately to his cot bed and lay down on his back.

Muttchopf sat on the chair by his cot. “I see our pads are gone,” he noted, gesturing at the single plastic desk.

“Ah,” Gen said. “Anything else missing?”

“Don’t know yet. We didn’t have much.”

“So,” Gen said, “you seemed to be indicating that there was something you wanted to talk to me about?”

Muttchopf nodded. “Look, the night we were snatched, Jeff here activated a covert channel he had inserted into one of the high-frequency trading cables of a company we’ve worked for a few times. He sent off some instructions. He was trying to amend the trading rules and the, the state of the world, I guess you’d say, by a direct fix. Shunt some information and money to the SEC, do some whistle-blowing. I’m not sure what else. He had a whole program, but the point bite was probably what caught someone’s attention. It coulda looked like an ordinary theft, or maybe whistle-blowing. Anyway, very soon after he pushed the button on that, as far as we can remember, we were knocked out. It was almost too fast to be a response, but then again, my memory of it is fuzzy. Maybe it was a couple hours, who can say. But for sure that same night.”

“And who were you working for when this happened?”

“No one. We lost our jobs, we were gigging.”

Gen took this in. “You weren’t working for Henry Vinson?”

Rosen looked surprised at this. “He’s my cousin. We worked for him before.”

“I know. I mean, we saw that in your records.”

Muttchopf spoke when it became clear Rosen wasn’t going to. “We did work for him, yeah. And that was where Jeff put in his tap, in his cousin’s company’s dark pool diver. And that’s also who he did a little whistle-blowing on. But we weren’t working for him that night. We were fired before that.”

“He has always been an asshole,” Rosen said bitterly.

Gen watched them closely. “When was this? And what happened?”

Muttchopf had to tell the story. Three years earlier, a stint with Adirondack, where Vinson had been CEO. Questionable work there, rigging dark pools. Later a gig for Alban Albany, Vinson’s company. It was only work for hire, a contract, but they had signed nondisclosure agreements, as always. While doing the job Jeff had found evidence of malfeasance and taken it to his cousin; they had argued. Then Jeff and Mutt had been fired. This, combined with the loss of their apartment to the watery shallows, had started them on their wandering around lower Manhattan, leading to their arrival at the Met.

“He was cheating again,” Jeff added when Mutt had finished. “Fucking sleazebag that he is.”

“What do you mean?” Gen asked.

Jeff just shook his head, too disgusted to speak.

Muttchopf’s lips were pulsing in and out as he regarded Gen, apparently assessing her level of financial acumen.

“It was a dark pool version of front-running,” he said. “Say you get an order for something at 100. Immediately you go out and buy it for yourself at 100, in the hope that that will drive up the price, meanwhile not fulfilling the first order. If the price then goes up to 103, you sell what you bought, while telling the person who made the order that you couldn’t find a buyer. If on the other hand it goes down to 98, you fulfill the order at 100. Either way you’re good. There’s no way to lose.”

“Nice,” Gen said.

“But illegal,” Jeff said, still disgusted. “I told him that and he just told me it wasn’t happening. He told me to fuck off.”

“What if you had blown the whistle on him?” Gen asked.

“I tried that before,” Jeff said. “When I was working for the Senate. No one believed me, and I couldn’t prove it.”

“It’s hard to prove,” Muttchopf said. “It’s like proving an intention. It happens in nanoseconds. You’d have to have complete records of everything, happening more than once.”

“I could prove it now,” Jeff muttered darkly.

“You could?” Gen said.

“Definitely. Most definitely. He was still doing it when we were canned. He’s been doing it for years. I took snaps.”

Gen stared at them. “So, that sounds to me like a good reason to stash you away somewhere. Do you think he did it?”

“We don’t know,” Muttchopf said. “We talked about it a lot, but we have no way of knowing. Some time had passed, and I’m not sure we really could prove it. And Jeff had just tapped into the CME with his bite, and sent a package with the bitten-off points to the SEC. So it’s complicated.”

Gen thought it over. “Okay, get some rest. We’ve got extra security on this building and on this floor, so you may notice that, but it will just be us. No one is going to be bothering you anymore.”

“Good.”

Next day Gen got a private pouch delivered to her by hand, from Goran’s office. The printed lists of letters and numbers were incomprehensible to her. It looked as if some of them were GPS positions, but other than that, nothing.

Then an hour later Goran dropped by.

“Secure room?” he asked.

“Yes. Faradayed, anyway.”

“Okay, what you’re seeing there is a bunch of remotely operated submarines that were visiting the container every twelve hours, coming over from a very busy dock in Queens. So there’s not much we can do there, without catching one of the subs to help us. There are thousands of people using that dock.”

“So we’re out of luck.”

“Looks like it. But you mentioned Pinscher Pinkerton, so I took a look through the data to see if there were any connections to your case, and found some stuff I thought you’d be interested in. They definitely do security for Alban Albany, and they do personal security for Henry Vinson too. And they’ve been tied to a number of disappearances. Also to some murders, in the opinion of the FBI. They’re on the FBI’s top ten list of the worst security companies. Which is a hard list to crack, and a bad sign.”

Gen pondered this. “Okay, thanks Goran.”

“It will be hard to prove anything about what’s already happened,” Goran said. “If it were possible, the FBI would have already stuck them. Your best bet may be to catch them in the act during the next thing they do.”

e) Charlotte

Time came for the co-op members to vote on whether to accept the bid on the building from Morningside Realty, fronting for whomever. Charlotte’s half-assed investigations had not been able to crack the façade there, and in any case, no matter who was behind it, the CC&Rs of the co-op required that a vote be taken on matters like this within ninety days of their initiation, and this was day eighty-nine, and she wanted no technical infractions to cause trouble later. She had done her best to ask around and get a sense of what people thought, but really, in a building of forty stories and over two thousand people, it wasn’t possible to catch the vibe just by nosing around. She had to trust that people valued the place as much as she did, and toss the dice as required. In essence the vote would be a poll, and if they voted to sell then she would sue them or kill herself, depending on her mood. She was not in a good mood.

Many of the building’s residents gathered in the dining hall and common room to vote, filling the rooms as they were seldom filled, even during meal hours. Charlotte gazed at the fellow citizens of their little city-state with such trepidation and political distrust that really it seemed like a new kind of fear. Curiosity also was killing her, but there was no way of telling from their faces and manner which way they were going to vote. Most of the faces were familiar or semi- or pseudo-familiar. Her neighbors. Although they were only the ones who had shown up in person; anyone in the co-op could vote from anywhere in the world, and this crowd was probably only half the voting membership. Still, the time was now, and if people were voting in absentia they would have to have already gotten their votes in. So the tally would be finished at the end of the hour.

People said what they had to say. Building great; building not so great. Offer great; offer not so great. Four billion meant around two million per co-op member; this was a lot, or it wasn’t. Charlotte couldn’t stay focused long enough to catch more than the pro or con expressed, leaving the gist of people’s arguments to some later time when she might give a shit. She knew what she knew. Get to it for God’s sake.

So finally Mariolino called for a vote, and people clicked their clickers, which were all registered to them, and Mariolino waited until everyone indicated they had done the deed, then tapped his pad such that he had added the votes of those present to the votes of the absentees. Anyone who hadn’t voted at this point was simply not part of the decision, as long as they had a quorum. And there was going to be a quorum.

Finally Mariolino looked up at Charlotte and then the others in the room.

“The vote is against taking the offer on the building. 1,207 against, 1,093 for.”

There was a kind of double gasp from those in the room, first at the decision, then at the closeness of it. Charlotte was both relieved and worried. It had been too close. If the offer was repeated at a substantially higher amount, as often happened in uptown real estate, then it wouldn’t take many people to change their minds for the decision to shift. So it was like a stay of execution. Better than the alternative, but not exactly reassuring. In fact, the more she thought about it, the angrier she got at the half of her fellow citizens who had voted to sell. What were they thinking? Did they really imagine that money in any amount could replace what they had made here? It was as if nothing had been learned in the long years of struggle to make lower Manhattan a livable space, a city-state with a different plan. Every ideal and value seemed to melt under a drenching of money, the universal solvent. Money money money. The fake fungibility of money, the pretense that you could buy meaning, buy life.

She stood up, and Mariolino nodded at her. As chair it was okay for her to speak, to sum things up.

“Fuck money,” she said, surprising herself. “It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Because everything is not fungible to everything else. Many things can’t be bought. Money isn’t time, it isn’t security, it isn’t health. You can’t buy any of those things. You can’t buy community or a sense of home. So what can I say. I’m glad the vote went against this bid on our lives. I wish it had been much more lopsided than it was. We’ll go on from here, and I’ll be trying to convince everyone that what we’ve made here is more valuable than this monetary valuation, which amounts to a hostile takeover bid of a situation that is already as good as it can get. It’s like offering to buy reality. That’s a rip at any price. So think about that, and talk to the people around you, and the board will meet for its usual scheduled meeting next Thursday. I trust this little incident won’t be on the agenda. See you then.”

After she had spoken with a number of people who came up to commiserate or argue, Vlade approached. It was clear he wanted to talk to her in private, so she made her excuses to the last clutch of residents, who would have been happy to argue all night long, and followed Vlade to the elevators.

“What’s up?” she said when they were alone.

“Some things have come up you should know about,” Vlade said. “So now that you’re free, why don’t we go up to the farm. Most of the people involved are up there, and Amelia is just about to arrive and tie off her blimp, and she might be a good one to have in on this too.”

“In on what?”

“Come on up and see. It will take a while to explain.” He pulled a bottle of white wine from his refrigerator and held it up for her inspection. “We can also celebrate holding on to the building.”

“For now.”

“It’s always for now, right?”

She was not in the mood to indulge his Balkan clod-of-earth stoicism, and merely hmphed and followed him into the elevator.

Up they rode in silence and got off at the farm. Vlade led the way over to the hotellos and called out, “Knock knock, we’re here to visit.”

“Come on in,” said a voice.

“Too crowded in there,” Vlade replied. “Why don’t you guys come out here and we’ll drink a toast.”

“To what?” someone asked, while someone else said, “Good idea.”

Out of the tent emerged the two boys Vlade indulged around the docks, and the old man they had befriended and then rescued from his drowned squat; and then the two men who had disappeared from the farm so many weeks ago.

“Hey!” Charlotte said to the two men. “You’re back!”

Mutt and Jeff nodded.

“I’m so glad to see you!” She gave them each a brief hug. “We were worried about you! What happened?”

Mutt and Jeff shrugged.

Vlade said, “We were over in the Bronx doing some treasure hunting with the boys here, and we found these guys in a container down in the Cypress subway hole.”

Charlotte was amazed. “But didn’t you, you know—”

“Yeah,” Vlade said. “We got the water police to extricate them. They’ve been checked out at the station. Gen took care of all that. It’s been a long couple of days. But now they’re back, and I thought we should celebrate.”

“We persist in living,” Jeff said sardonically.

“Good idea,” Charlotte said, and sat down heavily on a chair by the railing. “Plus we voted to keep this building in our own hands, and won by like two votes. So lots to celebrate, yeah.”

“Come on!” Vlade objected. “There is! Plus the boys and Mr. Hexter have news too, right boys?”

The two boys nodded enthusiastically. “Big news,” Roberto declared.

They sat around the vegetable cleaning and cutting table, and Vlade uncorked the bottle and poured wine into white ceramic coffee cups. The two boys looked eagerly at him as he did this, and he regarded them squinting for a second, and then, shaking his head, poured them about a mouthful each. “Don’t start drinking now, boys. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.”

Roberto snorted at this and downed his shot like an Italian espresso. “I was a lush when I was seven,” he said. “I’m past that now. But I won’t say no to a refill.” Holding his cup out to Vlade.

“Quit it,” Vlade said.

Then while the two men were telling Charlotte their tale, Vlade went to the elevator and came back with Amelia Black. She had clearly been weeping on his shoulder, as he was frowning in a pleased way.

“Amelia’s back,” he said unnecessarily, and made introductions all around. Charlotte had only met the cloud star once before, and was content to be introduced again, as Amelia didn’t seem to recall their earlier meeting, in their conversation over the phone when Amelia had been trapped in her blimp’s closet.

“We’re celebrating,” Charlotte said grumpily.

“Well I’m not,” Amelia said, tearing up again. “They killed my bears.”

“We heard,” Vlade said.

“Your bears?” Charlotte asked.

Amelia gave her a bereft look and said, “I just mean I was the one who took them down to Antarctica. They were my friends.”

“We heard,” Vlade repeated.

“Fucking Antarctic Defense League,” Amelia said. “I mean there’s literally nothing down there but ice.”

“That’s what they like about it,” Charlotte supposed sourly. “It’s pure. And they’re pure. Purifying the world is their idea of what they’re doing.”

Amelia was scowling. “It’s true. But I hate them. Because it was a good idea to move those bears down there. And it could be temporary, you know? A few centuries. So I want to kill them, whoever they are. And I want the bears down there.”

“You could always move them in secret,” Charlotte suggested. “You don’t have to tell the whole world about it.”

“I didn’t!” Amelia protested. “We didn’t broadcast live.”

“But you would have later.”

“Sure, but not with the location. Besides, do you really think anything happens in secret anymore?” she asked, as if Charlotte were naïve.

“Lots of things happen in secret,” Charlotte said. “Just ask Mutt and Jeff here.”

“We were held hostage in a secret location,” Mutt explained to the mystified Amelia. “Three months.”

“I almost died,” Jeff said.

“I’m sorry,” Amelia said. She drained her cup in a single swallow, like Roberto. “But now you’re back.”

“And so are you,” Vlade reminded her. “And the boys helped Mr. Hexter here out of his lodging when it was melting, over in Chelsea. So some assisted migrations have worked, you might say. And here we are. We’re all here.”

“Not my polar bears,” Amelia objected.

“Well, true. That was a disaster, for sure. A crime.”

“It was about five percent of all the polar bears left alive in the wild. And Antarctica is their big chance for survival.”

“Just do it again,” Charlotte suggested again. “Do it in secret.”

Protecting endangered species in secret was a paradigm buster that left Amelia obviously conflicted, or even confused. But at least she was no longer on the verge of weeping. In fact she was refilling her cup.

“It’s a good idea,” Vlade said in transition, “but for now, the boys and Mr. Hexter and I have some news too.”

Charlotte nodded, relieved at the change of subject. She knew Vlade was very fond of their resident cloud star, but to Charlotte she seemed just as spacey and superficial as she did on her program, not that Charlotte had ever watched more than ten minutes of it. Naked starlets wrestling wolf pups: no. “So what’s up?” she said. “We need something better to celebrate than kidnapping, murdered bears, and almost selling our home to some fucking gentrifiers.”

“Did that happen?” Amelia cried.

“It did,” Charlotte said grimly.

“But, on the other hand,” Vlade weighed in heavily, “we didn’t take the offer. And the boys here used Mr. Hexter’s awesome historical research to locate the wreck of the HMS Hussar.”

“Which means what?” Charlotte asked.

The boys were delighted at her ignorance and quickly told her the story. British treasure ship, sunk in Hell Gate, searched for ever since, but only Mr. Hexter had pinned the spot where it went down, under a drowned parking lot in the Bronx. And the boys had dived it using their own diving bell (“Wait, what?” Charlotte said), and there it was, right where predicted, but down under twenty feet of mud and landfill, an unwieldy goo, impossible for the boys to dig up on their own, so Vlade had enlisted the help of his friends Idelba and Thabo, who ran a huge, huge, gigantic sand dredge out at Coney Island, they were moving Coney Island’s beach up to the new shoreline twenty blocks north, and for them digging up the Hussar’s treasure chest (actual treasure chests, small but insanely heavy) was nothing, it was toothpick work, and now Idelba and Thabo were part of their consortium, joining the people right here around this table.

“Gold?” Charlotte and Amelia said together.

Mr. Hexter and the boys explained the story of the British army’s adherence to the gold standard, mark of an earlier age’s concept of money. Four million dollars in gold. In 1780 dollars. Meaning that now, using the median of about twenty inflation calculators Mr. Hexter had found, they were sitting on about four billion dollars.

“Aren’t there laws about salvaging sunken treasure?” Charlotte asked.

There were. But the flood had created so many legal snarls around the intertidal that the laws were no longer so clear as they had been.

“You ignored the laws,” Charlotte said.

“We didn’t tell anyone,” Vlade clarified. “So far. And Idelba has a salvage license. But that gold was lost. It was never going to be found. So, you know. If we melted the coins down, it would just be gold bars.”

“But wait. These gold coins, aren’t they more valuable historically than just plain gold would be? And the ship too. Aren’t they archaeological artifacts, part of the city’s history and all?”

“The ship was smooshed,” Roberto said. “It was all gooed up in the gunk, all rotted and everything.”

“But the chests, and the coins?”

“They found a cannon of the Hussar a long time ago,” Vlade said. “It was even still loaded, they had to cut the cannonball out of the rust and get the gunpowder out of it so it wouldn’t blow up. It’s somewhere in Central Park.”

“So since we’ve got that we don’t need the gold coins, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

Charlotte shook her head. “I can’t believe you guys.”

“Well,” Vlade said, “look at it this way. How much was that bid on the building here? Four billion, right? Four point one billion dollars, didn’t you say?”

“Hmm,” Charlotte said.

“We could outbid them.”

“But it’s already our building.”

“You know what I mean. We could afford to fend them off.”

“True.” Charlotte thought it over. “I don’t know. It still strikes me as a problem. I’d be very interested to hear what Inspector Gen would say about it. About what we should do with it to normalize it, so to speak. To monetize it.”

The others said nothing to this. Obviously consulting a police inspector about the matter did not appeal to them. On the other hand, Inspector Gen was a resident and a known presence. Solid; polite; reassuring; a straight shooter. A bit scary, in fact, and now in more ways than one.

“Come on,” Charlotte said. “She would keep it to herself.”

“Would she?” Vlade asked.

“I think so.”

Vlade shrugged, looked around at the others. The boys were round-eyed with consternation, Mr. Hexter cross-eyed, Mutt and Jeff not yet returned to this planet, Amelia busy leaving it by way of the wine. Charlotte pinged Gen, found she was down in her room. “Gen, could you come up to the farm and give us an opinion on a city issue?”

A few minutes later, Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir was standing there before them, tall and massive in the dark, hard to see well. They invited her to sit down, and then hesitantly, as if it were some kind of hypothetical case, Vlade and Mr. Hexter explained about the recovery of the Hussar’s gold. Gen watched them politely as they spoke.

“So,” Charlotte said at the end of their recitation, “what do you think we should do about it?”

Gen continued to look at them, blinking as she regarded them each in turn. “You’re asking me?”

“Yes. Obviously. As I just said.”

Gen shrugged. “I’d keep it. Melt the coins down, sell the gold as needed.”

Charlotte stared at her. “You would do that?”

“Yes. Obviously. As I just said.” Slightly slow and pointed with that last sentence, and including a glance at Charlotte.

“Sorry,” Charlotte said. “It’s been a long day. But, I mean—melt the coins?”

“Yes.”

“But what about the…”

“What about the what?”

“What about the law?” Roberto said. “You’re police!”

Gen shrugged. “I hope you know that the New York Police Department is about more than making lawyers rich.” She gestured to Amelia to pour her a cup of wine. “Look, if you go public it will be big news for a week, and then in the courts for ten years, and at the end of that time, whatever the gold was worth will belong to the lawyers. Charlotte, you’re a lawyer, you know what I’m saying.”

“True.”

“So why? Just keep it. You could use it to set up a foundation or whatever. Buy this building or whatever.”

“We already own the building,” Charlotte complained, still aggrieved by the night’s vote.

“Whatever. Do some good with it. If it’s really four billion, you should be able to do something.”

“Four billion dollars is just the start of it,” Jeff muttered darkly.

“What do you mean?” Charlotte asked.

“Leverage. Monetize the gold, use it as collateral, leverage it like a hedge fund would, those fuckers are leveraged out a hundred times what they start with.”

“Sounds dangerous,” Vlade said.

“It is. They don’t give a shit.”

“I hate that kind of thing,” Charlotte said.

“Of course you do. You’re a sensible person. But when you’re fighting the devil, sometimes you gotta use the devil’s weapons.”

“There’s finance people in the building,” Vlade said. “The guy that keeps saving the boys, he’s kind of a jerk, but he does finance.”

Charlotte frowned. “Franklin Garr? I like him.”

Vlade rolled his eyes at her just like Larry used to back in the day. “If you say so. Anyway he lives here. And he did pull these boys out of the drink a couple of times. We could maybe talk it over with him as a hypothetical situation, see how he seems about it.”

“That would be interesting,” Charlotte allowed. “Although I’m still not sure that you guys should be hiding this gold you found.”

They all regarded her. Gen was shaking her head and helping Amelia open a second bottle. Charlotte sighed and gave up on that issue. To her the rule of law was the last thread holding them all from a fatal plunge into the abyss of anarchy and madness. But there was their Inspector Gen, famous policewoman, a power in the city, a pillar of the SuperVenice, happily ignoring this bad fate by conferring with Amelia about vintages of vinho verde or some such nonsense.

“What do you think?” Charlotte asked Mutt and Jeff.

Mutt waggled a hand. “Anyone could monetize that gold for you. The hard part is figuring out what to do with it.”

“And staying out of their clutches,” Jeff muttered.

“They being?”

Jeff and Mutt looked at each other. They were like feral twins at this point, Charlotte thought. Dragged out of the woods with their own private language, semi-telepathic and probably barking mad.

“The system,” Mutt suggested.

“Capital,” Jeff clarified. “It will always win. It will eat your brain.”

“Not my brain,” Charlotte declared.

“You say that now, but you’re not a billionaire. Not yet.”

“I hate that shit,” Charlotte said. “I’d like to crash it.”

“Me too,” Amelia interjected. “I want it for the animals.”

“I want it for this building,” Charlotte said grimly.

Mutt regarded her. “So to save your co-op from a takeover you would destroy the entire global economic system?”

“Yes.”

“Nice work if you can get it!” Jeff pointed out crabbily. Charlotte glared at him, and he raised a hand to ward her off: “Hey, I like the concept! It’s just not that easy. I mean that’s what I was trying to do, and look what happened.”

“But did you really try?” Charlotte inquired.

“I thought I did.”

“Well, maybe we need to try again, then. Take another angle.”

“Please,” Mutt said.

Jeff scowled. “I will be interested to see this different angle.”

“Me too.” Charlotte looked around at them, stuck out her coffee cup for seconds. Amelia smiled the smile that had made her a cloud star, filled her cup. When they all had gotten refills they toasted Mutt and Jeff’s safe return.

f) Franklin

So the building super, Vlade the derailer, came over one morning when he was pulling my bug out of the rafters of his ever-more-crowded boathouse, leering in what appeared to be his attempt at a friendly smile. Ever since he had dragooned me to save the dock rats from drowning, he’d regarded me as if we were buddies, which we were not, although it would have been nice if he had kept my boat closer to the door as a result of this pseudo-bond.

“What?” I said.

“Charlotte wants to talk to you,” he said.

“So?”

“So you want to talk to Charlotte.”

“It doesn’t follow.”

“In this case it does.” And he gave me a look that had lost all the new bondiness. “You will find it very interesting,” he added. “Possibly even lucrative.”

“Lucrative? For me?”

“Possibly. Certainly for people in this building that you know.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the boys you helped me rescue the other week. Turns out they are needing some investment advice, and Charlotte and I are stepping in as their help.”

“Investment advice? Are they selling drugs now?”

“Please. They have come into an inheritance, so to speak.”

“From who?”

“Charlotte will explain the situation. Can you meet her for drinks after dinner?”

“I don’t know.”

“You want to do this.” With a Transylvanian look that suggested my boat could be suspended quite high, like up there with the cloud star’s blimp on top of the building.

“All right.”

“Good. Bottle of wine, up at the farm, tonight at ten.”

“I’ll be there.”

So I passed the day in the usual multiple temporalities of the screen, so many different chronologies mooshing together that it felt like no time at all. In this no-time I firmed up my impression that the intertidal bubble was getting bigger and thinner, closer to popping. But with winter bearing down at last, the real estate in the drowned zone would freeze in place physically, causing prices to do the same. Volatility suppression by way of extreme low temperatures: a known phenomenon, empirically confirmed in the data and known as freezing prices. Certain kinds of traders devoted to volatility as such didn’t like it. Jokes were made about these traders throwing themselves out of skyscrapers because stock prices had gone too stable.

So I spent the bulk of my day researching submarine demolition and dock piling foundations. In the late afternoon I skimmed home by way of the East River, moving through the alternation of long shadows and lanes of silver sunlight. It was cold, and the river was like a plate of brushed aluminum set under a lead sky, a sight that announced winter and took my mind off Jojo; or rather it made me think, Ah, now I’m not thinking about Jojo. Damn it anyway. I turned into Twenty-third and hummed to the Met, which was still flying Amelia Black’s blimp like a big wind sock, the late sun burnishing the gilded cupola under it. Gold against lead: very nice. As I came chugging into the bacino, homey in its shadows, I found myself in a better mood than when I had left the office. That was something the city could do for you.

After a perfunctory dinner in the commons I went up to the farm floor and found Charlotte already there, with Vlade and the old man that the two boys had taken in, and Amelia Black the cloud babe, plus a couple of men who looked like hobos. It was explained to me that they were the quants from our farm who had gone missing, now restored to us.

“What’s up?” I said, taking a coffee cup of wine from Vlade.

Charlotte clinked her coffee cup with mine. “Have a seat,” she said, a bit chairpersonistically. “We have questions for you.”

I sat down with Charlotte facing me, and the others sat around us. Amelia Black kept the wine bottle on the floor by her chair.

Charlotte said, “Our boys, Roberto and Stefan, have inherited some money.”

“Our boys?” I inquired.

“Well, you know. They’ve become like wards of the building.”

“Is that possible?”

“Anything’s possible,” Charlotte said, then frowned, as if realizing the inaccuracy of that statement. “I suppose I might foster-parent them. Anyway, they’ve inherited a kind of trust fund.”

“What, are they brothers?”

“They’re like brothers,” Charlotte said. “Anyway they’re both part of this, and they want us to be part of it. Meaning Vlade, me, and Mr. Hexter. And a couple of Vlade’s friends.”

“And how much are we talking about?” I asked.

“A lot.”

“Like how much?”

“Maybe a few billion dollars.”

I could feel my jaw resting on my chest. The others were staring at me as if I were an amusing screen comedy. I closed my mouth, sipped from my coffee cup. Horrible wine. “Who adopted them again?”

They laughed briefly at my needlepoint wit. “The point is,” Charlotte said, still smiling, “they want to help the co-op, and they know you and trust you.”

“Why?”

“That’s what I said.”

The others laughed again. The chairperson and I were like a comedy team, although all I could think to say at that moment was “Touché.” Which is never much of a riposte, even though it is a fencing term, but I was still startled by the notion of the squeakers as billionaires.

“Joke,” Charlotte reassured me. “I trust you too. And they said that you’ve come through every time they’ve gotten in trouble. And they need financial advice. So I was wondering if you could suggest any way for them to invest this nest egg in a way that is safe but would grow it fast.”

I shook my head. “Those are opposites. Safe and fast are financial opposites.”

The two hobo quants nodded at this. “Economics one,” the smaller one observed. Which it was.

“Okay,” Charlotte said. “But finding the right balance between them is what you do, right?”

“That’s right,” I said, just a tad patiently, to indicate the oversimplicity of this description. “The heart of the problem, you might say. Risk management.”

“So, we were wondering if you would be willing to advise us, on a kind of pro bono basis.”

I frowned. “Typical hedge fund terms are two percent of the amount invested up front, then twenty percent of whatever I make for you over the market average for that period. Twenty percent of the alpha, as they say.”

“Right,” she said. “Which is why I asked about pro bono.”

“But it sounds like they can afford the fee.”

“They’re including the co-op in this deal.”

I let her contemplate just how vague that statement was. Like meaningless. But she waited me out, looking unrepentant. The others watched me like I was TV.

“Let’s talk hypothetically for a while,” I suggested. “First, why do you want to put this money in a hedge fund? Because there are more secure ways to invest it.”

“I thought hedge funds were all about security. I thought hedging meant like hedging your bets. You invest it in ways such that whatever happens, we’ll still make money.”

The shorter of the quants was snorting in his coffee cup, elbowing his partner, who was stifling a grin.

“That’s what the term may have meant at some point,” I allowed. “At some point in the early modern period. But for a long time now, hedge funds have been about helping investors who have a lot of money, like enough money that they can afford to lose some, to make more than the other forms of investing would make them, assuming things go well. It’s high risk high reward, with some actual hedging going on to reduce the high risk.”

Charlotte was nodding like she knew this already. “And each hedge fund manager makes different choices in that regard, that are like their trade secret.”

“That’s right.”

“And you work for WaterPrice, and are good at what you do.”

“Yes.”

“You look like you are,” Amelia Black tossed in.

“You do too,” I said, realizing too late that this could perhaps be understood as a way of saying You look like you would be good at hanging from blimps without your clothes on. That didn’t seem quite right, but she must have heard versions of this compliment before, as it was kind of true, and in any case she only smiled her lovely smile.

Charlotte aimed a look at Amelia, like, Don’t encourage him. “So,” she said, “if you were in charge of the boys’ money, what would you do with it?”

“Again, what do they want? And why would you do it this way?”

“What we’re ultimately hoping for is that this might allow us to protect the building from any kind of hostile takeover. And for that, we were thinking that four billion dollars might not be enough.”

“To buy this building?”

“We own it already.” She too could be just a little patient. “But to keep it from being bought by a bid so large that the majority of the co-op would take it.”

“Ah,” I said. “No, four billion isn’t enough to do that.”

“Because there’s a lot more out there?”

“Right. Several trillion dollars changes hands every day. Or every second.”

They all gaped except for the two quants. The smaller of them said, “It’s fictional money, but still.”

“Fictional money?” Charlotte asked him.

“Paper,” he explained. “Loans beyond actual assets. Futures and derivatives and instruments of all kinds. Lots of paper that supposedly would convert to money, but that couldn’t happen if everyone tried to do it at once.”

“That’s right,” I agreed. “So you guys are the two quants who disappeared?”

“We’re coders,” the smaller one said.

“We’re quants,” the taller one said.

“Stop it,” Charlotte said.

“Welcome back,” I added.

She went on: “So, Frankolino, are you saying that no matter how much we grew this four billion, there would be people who had so much more that they could swamp our amount?”

“Yes.”

She gave me a look like it was my fault, but I judged it a mock look. She said, “So what would you advise us to do?”

“You could buy the co-op yourselves. Buy it, go private, do what you want. Someone wants to buy your building, you tell them to fuck off.”

“Well, okay. That’s nice to think there is some kind of an option. Some kind of anti-community privatizing asshole option. Any others?”

“Well,” I said, warming to my task. “You could start a hedge fund yourself, leverage the boys’ money, and then you’re playing with hundreds of billions. Which you invest in targeted ways.”

Charlotte stared at me as if trying to comprehend some kind of mystery. “And that’s what you do.”

“Yes.”

“I like that,” Amelia Black said.

Charlotte shook her head hard: Quit encouraging him! “Any other methods you can suggest?”

“Sure,” I said. “New instruments are always getting devised. Real estate is always popular, because it isn’t vaporware. Although in the intertidal maybe it is. That’s my big question right now. The floods Case-Shillered a tenth of all the real estate in the world to zero, but now my index shows it’s almost back to par. So that’s been encouraging, maybe even bubble-istic.”

Charlotte frowned. “So what do we do in this situation?”

“You short it.”

“Meaning what?”

“You bet the bubble is going to pop. Buy instruments so that when it does pop, you win. You win so big that the only worry you have is that civilization itself collapses and there’s no one left to pay you.”

“Civilization?”

“Financial civilization.”

“Not the same!” she said. “I would love to bring down financial civilization!”

“You would need to get in line,” I told her.

I liked the way she laughed. The quants were laughing too. Amelia was laughing to see the others laugh. She did in fact have a beautiful smile. As did Charlotte, now that I finally saw it.

“Tell me how,” Charlotte said, eyes alight with the notion of destroying civilization.

Which I had to admit was fun. “Think about ordinary people in their own lives. They need stability. They want what you could call illiquid assets, meaning home, job, health. Those aren’t liquid, and you don’t want them liquid. So you pay a steady stream of payments for those things to stay illiquid, meaning mortgage payments, health insurance, pension fund inputs, utility bills, all that sort of thing. Everyone pays every month, and finance counts on having those steady inputs of money. They borrow based on that certainty, they use that certainty as collateral, and then they use that borrowed money to bet on markets. They leverage out a hundred times their assets in hand, which mostly consist of the payment streams that people make to them. Those people’s debts are their assets, pure and simple. People have illiquidity, and finance has liquidity, and finance profits from the spread between those two states. And every spread is a chance to make more.”

Charlotte was regarding me with a laser eye. “You’re aware you’re talking to the chief executive officer of the Householders’ Union?”

“That’s what you do?” I asked, feeling suddenly ignorant. Householders’ was a kind of Fannie Mae for renters and other poor people; the name was aspirational, seemed to me. Some important data from it went into the IPPI, as part of the rating of consumer confidence.

Charlotte said, “That’s what I do. But go on. You were saying?”

“Well, the classic example of a confidence crash is 2008. That bubble had to do with mortgages held by people who had promised to pay who couldn’t really pay. When they defaulted, investors everywhere ran for the door. Everyone was trying to sell at once, but no one wanted to buy. The people who shorted that made a killing, but everyone else got killed. Financial firms even stopped making contracted payments, because they didn’t have the money in hand to pay everyone they owed, and there was a good chance the entity they were supposed to pay wouldn’t be there next week, so why waste money paying them just because payment was due? So at that point no one knew if any paper was worth anything, so everyone freaked and they went into free fall.”

“So what happened?”

“The government poured in enough money to allow some of them to buy the others, and it kept pouring in money until the banks felt more secure and could get back to business as usual. The taxpayers were forced to pay off the banks’ lost bets at one hundred cents on the dollar, a deal that was made because the top people at the Fed and the Treasury were right out of Goldman Sachs, and their instinct was to protect finance. They nationalized General Motors, a car company, and kept it running until it was back on its feet and paid off its debt to the people. But the banks and big investment firms they just gave a pass. And then on it went, the same as it had before, until the crash of 2061 in the First Pulse.”

“And what happened then?”

“They did it all over again.”

She threw up her hands. “But why? Why why why?”

“I don’t know. Because it worked? Because they got away with it? Anyway, since then it’s like they have the template for what to do. A script to follow. So they did it again after the Second Pulse. And now round four may be coming. Or whatever the number, because bubbles go all the way back to Dutch tulips, or Babylon.”

Charlotte looked at the two prodigal quants. “Is this right?”

They nodded. “It’s what happened,” the taller one said lugubriously.

Charlotte palmed her forehead. “But what does it mean? I mean, what could we do different?”

I raised a finger, enjoying my moment of one-eyedness among the blind. “You could pop the bubble on purpose, having arranged a different response to the crash that would follow.” I pointed the raised finger over my shoulder, at uptown. “If liquidity relies on a steady payment stream from ordinary people, which it does, then you could crash the system any time you wanted, by people stopping their payments. Mortgages, rents, utilities, student debt, health insurance. Stop paying, everyone at once. Call it Odious Debt Default Day, or a financial general strike, or get the pope to declare it the Jubilee, he can do that anytime he wants.”

“But wouldn’t people get in trouble?” Amelia inquired.

“There would be too many of them. You can’t put everyone in jail. So in that basic sense, people still have power. They have leverage because of all the leverage. I mean, you’re the head of the Householders’ Union, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, think about it. What do unions do?”

Now Charlotte was smiling at me again, eyes alight, really an intelligent and warm smile. “They strike.”

“Exactly.”

“I like this!” Amelia exclaimed. “I like this plan.”

“It could work,” the taller quant said. He looked at his friend. “What do you think? Does it meet with your approval?”

“Fuck yes,” the smaller one said. “I want to kill them all.”

“Me too!” Amelia said.

Charlotte laughed at them. She picked up her cup and held it toward me, and I lifted mine and we clinked them together. Both cups were empty.

“Another glass of wine?” she suggested.

“It’s terrible.”

“I take that as a yes?”

“Yes.”

g) Amelia

Amelia banged around New York for a few days, too angry and distracted to do anything. At first she liked Franklin from the building, a good-looking man, but he thought she was a simpleton, so then she didn’t like him. She saw a few friends and talked over projects with her producers, but nothing appealed to her, and everyone agreed that she was probably not going to do a very good job of hosting an entertaining program about assisted migration when the main thing she talked about now was capturing and jailing everyone in the Antarctic Defense League, or alternatively killing them dead.

“Amelia, you’ve got to stop with that,” Nicole said. “If you can’t stop feeling it, you at least have to stop saying it.”

“But my audience knows I say what I feel, that’s why they watch my show. And right now I am post-traumatic.”

“I know. So you have to stop feeling it.”

“But I feel what I feel.”

“Okay, I get that. So let’s get you feeling something else.”

So they went ice skating. A polar vortex had struck the area the week before, and it was still cold out. Very cold, in fact it felt much colder in Manhattan than it had on the Antarctic shore, that shore where her ursine brothers and sisters had been most foully murdered. It was so cold that the whole of New York harbor had frozen over. People were now driving trucks on the canals and over the Hudson to Hoboken, and even all the way out the Verrazano Narrows, as the sea surface was frozen about two miles out from there. From time to time the Hudson’s ice cracked, and big plates of it shoved up and tilted at the sky, looking just like the ice in dreadful Antarctica. She couldn’t shed those memories.

The canals of lower Manhattan were frozen so solid there was barely a crack in the ice, so it was as if the streets had come back, this time white, and slippery, and considerably higher than before, but in any case there to walk on, simple as that. Well, nothing was ever simple in the city; there were warm spots where machinery or some other source of heat remained down in the subways or sewers or utilidors of the undercity, and these plumes were warm enough to make the ice over them thin or, in a few well-known locations, not there at all. At these liquid pools in the general ice the harbor seals popped up for air, also the beavers and muskrats and other estuarine mammals, breathing while hoping not to get killed and eaten by predators, human or otherwise. Really the world was such a horrid place. It was so often kill or be killed. Eat some of your neighbors and then get eaten by others.

Nicole was acting weird, like Amelia was some kind of bomb that might go off. And any boyfriend she had ever had in New York had left town, or was too unhappy or unhappy-making to recontact. Really there was nothing to do.

And so there they were, ice skating. Actually it was kind of fun. In her childhood Amelia had learned to skate on ponds and rivers, so she could handle the canals’ rough patches, and skate backward, which was fun, and even twirl a little, although this was not so fun, as it reminded her of when her mom had made her do things for contests. Her mom had been a stage mom, and Amelia supposed she had to be grateful now that she was a performing artist, but she wasn’t. She did however like to ice skate.

So she skated with Nicole, up and down Broadway from Union Square to Thirty-fourth, feeling the chill air in her lungs, nose tingling, feeling all the glorious feelings of being out in winter under a pale sky, the sun just barely clearing the horizon to the south, casting long shadows to the north from all the buildings. It was like they had all been transported to an ice planet somewhere, and yet there were the same familiar buildings and delis and kayak stores, with the only difference being the canals were a solid if dirty white. The city had even put some real buses back on the streets, old buses with new motors. That made the views up and down the steel canyons look like old photos, but with ice skaters replacing taxis. Walkers had to stay near the buildings or risk the fate of inattentive jaywalkers during the old days.

Amelia skated at speed, going faster than the taxis of earlier times would have been able to, because she could dodge through traffic like a motorcyclist. Nicole could not keep up with her. If someone walked in front of her she yelled “BEEP BEEP BEEP” and dodged them with inches to spare.

But then she found herself going so fast that she accidentally skated through a stretch of red tape crossing the intersection of Broadway and Twenty-eighth, and below her the ice got thin, and she thought of her father’s saying, Skate fast over thin ice, but even skating as fast as she could, the ice broke under her. Not only was she dumped instantly into cold water, but a broken chunk of ice caught her right under the ribs and knocked the wind out of her just as she plunged completely under. The shock of the cold would have driven the air from her lungs anyway, but it was already gone, so she choked and in doing so took some water into her lungs, so she coughed and choked again. And then she was drowning.

Flailing, panicking, she swam hard upward and banged into ice—there was a clear ceiling of ice between her and the air! She had slid under the unbroken ice! And now would drown for sure! A huge adrenaline surge shot through her body, turning her blood to fire and making her more desperate than ever for air. She elbowed the ice above her as hard as she could, but it was a weak blow. Now she was only seeing a blur of blacks and grays. She didn’t know what to try next, where to swim next. She knocked the back of her head up against the ice. That hurt, but nothing more happened. She was doomed.

Then there was a loud crashing around her, and she was grabbed and dragged upward by she knew not what. There she was, hanging in the air, dragged sideways, held up by several people moving around her and shouting—she was gasping, freezing, coughing, choking, drowning still although in the air, and being shuffled away from a big jagged wet hole in the ice, which these passersby had apparently bashed to get to her. They had seen her under the ice, they told her loudly, seen the accident and followed her momentum, and smashed the ice with shoes and ski poles and elbows and foreheads, and pulled her out. People were so nice! But she was freezing, really freezing, too cold to shiver even, or breathe, so her gasps were balked as she tried to breathe in, craving the air as she tried to get it in her, but only managing to cough out canal water. The air seemed to stick in her throat. “C-c-cold!” she finally managed to choke out with the water.

“Come on, get her in here,” someone shouted. Everyone was talking at once, she was lifted into a building, even she could tell it was warmer in there, maybe, and then they had her in a ladies’ room, no, a locker room of some kind, maybe it was a gym, a spa, and they were taking her clothes off. Someone remarked very cheerfully that it was just like one of her shows, that it wasn’t every day you got to strip a cloud star to save her life. Everyone but Amelia laughed at that, although she would have too if she could have, because it had of course been a major feature of her shows during those first couple years in the cloud. So it was like old times to get stripped down and thrown in a hot shower, and a few people even got in there with her, not naked, just getting wet in their clothes while propping her up and encouraging her, laughing and talking animatedly, and hopefully enjoying her nakedness, as she would have herself if she could have felt or thought anything. The shower water they kept lukewarm, so that her capillaries didn’t expand and drain her heart of blood, they said, good idea, but it wasn’t as warm as she would have liked, and she was shivering more than ever. Nicole was just outside the shower door, keeping dry but also checking her out and Amelia supposed filming her. The strangers were more blunt about it. “Come on gal, stand up and get that warm water on the back of your neck.” “Someone get this woman some dry clothes.” “Where we gonna do that?” “Here’s a towel, she can dry off and wear it till they find some things.” “Little warmer now, she’s coming around. Not too fast though, don’t kill her like those Chilean sailors.”

She was coming around. She was still painfully cold, her skin mottled red on white in a kind of pinto or Appaloosa fashion, it probably wasn’t her best look, although it could possibly be taken as orgasmic or something; the water was hotter now, and she was feeling better and better. She had only been submerged in the canal for a couple of minutes, they said, so now the water on her skin began to feel kind of painfully hot, actually. Like burning hot. “Hey!” she said. “Ow! Hot! Hot!”

So they cooled it a bit, and slowly they brought her back to a safe temperature internally, and dried her off, and got her into some clothes borrowed or bought on layaway, or put-’em-on, as someone said it should be called. Layaway, put-’em-on, lots of laughs at this. A very friendly crowd. “You are all so nice!” Amelia said. “Thank you for saving my life!” And she burst into tears.

“Let’s get you home,” Nicole said.

When Amelia had recovered from her dunking in the canal, she got in the Assisted Migration and flew from New York to the northeastern coast of Greenland. On the triangular island of hills between the Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden Fjord (which had been a glacier before the First Pulse) and the Zachariae Isstrom Fjord (likewise) stood a rather spectacular city called New Copenhagen. Given the state of old Copenhagen many people said this city should just be called Copenhagen, acknowledging that the city had in effect been relocated. Back in Denmark people sniffed at this presumptuousness and insisted their city was just fine, that it had always been a watery place. On the other hand the idea that there was another Copenhagen on the northeast corner of their old colony was not actually very objectionable, and the truth was that as the two places had little to do with each other, the names were not important. There was a Copenhagen in Ontario too.

In any case, Amelia had visited New Copenhagen before and was pleased when Frans guided the Assisted Migration down to the long line of masts at the southern end of the city, where a short fjord cut north to the island’s center, giving the island and city the shape of a horseshoe. The docks of the city protruded into the iced-over fjord, and behind them stood the downtown. Its buildings were mostly in the Greenland style, steep-pitched roofs on cubical shapes painted in bright primary colors, lit by hundreds of brilliant streetlights, which turned the darkness of the northern midwinter into a space far brighter than the interior of any room. The concert hall at the apex of the U was an enormous cube set on one point, homage to the similar concert hall in Reykjavík, and a famous locus for the New Arctic movement in long-duration opera and instrumental music. Some pieces played in this hall lasted all winter.

When her airship was secured, Amelia took a bus to the head of the fjord, where the biggest pedestrian district was located. The brilliantly lit cobblestone streets, blown clear of snow, were nearly empty, but then again it was very cold, and the few people out were mostly hurrying from one building to another. Despite the warming of the Arctic, midwinter here was still frigid, and sea-raw, as in any other coastal town. It reminded Amelia of Boston.

Inside a pub called Baltika it was steamy warm and loud with people enjoying a Friday evening. Amelia’s local friends from the Wildlife Migrators Association had gathered there to commiserate with her over her disastrous voyage south, to drink the memory away, and to discuss new plans. Some of them had helped her in Churchill, and they were as angry as she was at the wicked reception her bears had gotten in Antarctica.

One of them, Thorvald, was not as sympathetic as the others. “Antarctic Defense League includes almost every person down there, and they’re way worse than Defenders of Wildlife. People are only down there because they really want to be there. It’s like here, but more so. They really believe in it.”

“I know that,” Amelia said sulkily. “So what? Antarctica is huge, and if a few polar bears were living in a bay or two down there, so what? They could have shipped them back north in a few generations or a few hundred years. Round them up when things get cold enough again up here, send them home. It was a refuge!”

“But we didn’t consult them,” Thorvald said. “And they’re very caught up in their idea of Antarctica. The last wilderness, they call it. The last pure place.”

“I hate that shit,” Amelia said. “This is a mongrel planet. There’s no such thing as purity. The only thing that matters is avoiding extinctions.”

“I agree with you. But they don’t. So, you needed more than just people like me.”

He stared intently at her, and despite his rebukes, Amelia began to get the idea that he was coming on to her. Nothing new there, but in the mood she was in, it was somewhere between a comfort and an irritation. She might take him up on it. She still felt chilled right down to the bone, days after her dunking. It wasn’t just that anyway. Something had to change. Although the style he was using, as if by being rude he could boss her into bed, didn’t appeal to her.

“So what should we do?” she demanded. “My friends in New York were saying that if I kept it secret I could move some bears down there on the sly.”

They all shook their heads at this. Thorvald said, “You can see every polar bear on Earth from satellites. The Antarcticans would see them too. And we don’t want to get any more of them killed.”

“Maybe if we made a deal with them,” Amelia said.

But they shook their heads at this too.

“They won’t compromise,” Thorvald said. “If they were the kind of people who would compromise, they wouldn’t be there.”

Amelia sighed gloomily.

Thorvald said, “Maybe the thing to do is find new places around Greenland. There should be some newly opened bays where polar bears and their prey animals will do well.”

“It’s too warm up here now,” Amelia said. “That’s the point.”

Thorvald shrugged. “If you’re saying global temperatures have to drop for polar bears to survive, you would need to pull about a thousand gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere.”

“So what? Couldn’t we do that?”

“If that were our main project, yes. You would only have to change everything.”

“Oh come on. Everything?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t like that. It’s too much. So we have to do what we can. I mean, isn’t that what assisted migration is about?”

“Sure, fine. You need refugia in the hard times. But they are only stopgaps. You are the queen of stopgaps.”

“Stopgaps?”

“That’s what they are. Because in the long run, only a system fix will work. Until then, we try our stopgaps. We do what we can with the handouts of the rich. We try to save the world with their table scraps.”

Amelia found this depressing. She drank more aquavit, knowing that would only make her more depressed, but so what; that was how depressed she was. She didn’t care if she was being stupid. She wanted to be stupid right now. Because she had lost any thought of going to bed with this guy Thorvald. And in fact it might not have occurred to him anyway. He was in a heavy mood himself, or else he was that way all the time. Too much reality in him, and some kind of anger, maybe like her own anger, but they weren’t complementary. She needed a little fantasy to get off, and she thought everyone else did too. Maybe. She didn’t really know, but she could see that guys were fantasizing when they were with her, it was as clear as the gleam in their glassy eyes. They interacted with some fantasy Amelia in their heads, a mix of her show’s persona and her actual presence, and she played to that, and it made things easier in some ways. But it wasn’t really her. The real her was getting really, really mad.

“Meanwhile we don’t have to be rude,” she said primly.

At which he just rolled his eyes and polished off his drink.

She was too mad to go into the cloud and talk to her people, too mad to go home. Things were not right, and it was beyond her power to fix them. Ever since she had rescued baby birds who had fallen from their nests and started working at the local bird sanctuary to get away from her mom—a sanctuary that had been filled with birds who could be saved and put in some situation or other—she had been working on the unexamined assumption that she would continue to do that work all her life, at bigger levels, until all was right. And for a long time it had seemed to be working. Now, not. Now she was the queen of stopgaps.

She told Frans to take the blimp home the long way round.

“Did you say, the long way around?”

“That’s right.”

“New York is about five thousand kilometers southwest of us. The long way around would have us go over the North Pole, down the Pacific, across Antarctica, and back up the Americas. Estimated distance, thirty-eight thousand kilometers. Estimated time of flight, twenty-two days.”

“That’s fine.”

“Estimated food on board will last for eight days.”

“That’s fine. I need to lose some weight.”

“Your weight is currently two kilos below your last five years’ average.”

“Shut up,” she explained.

“I calculate the food shortage to be worse than a diet.”

Amelia sighed. She went to the corner of the bridge and looked at the globe floating there between two magnets, saw what Frans was talking about. She didn’t want to go back to Antarctica anyway. “Okay, make it a great spiral route instead of a great circle route. Head from here to Kamchatka, then across Canada and home.”

“Estimated time of trip, ten days.”

“That’s fine. That’s what I want.”

“You will get hungry.”

“Shut up and drive!”

“Ascending to bottom of jet stream to try to speed our journey home.”

“Fine.”

As the first dark days of this midwinter trip passed, she looked down on the North Atlantic. It took a long time to pass the glow of the brilliantly lit city on Svalbard, the Singapore of the Arctic, illuminating the night like an enormous Christmas tree. Then the Norwegian Alps, a line of fierce black and white spikes, with long flat white glaciers flowing between the peaks. Then Siberia, which went on for day after day. Even though the Russians had built some massive cities along their Arctic coastline, most of the tundra she floated over remained empty. Tundra, taiga, and boreal forest, with the so-called drunken forests bordering the taiga. White ice hills called pingos disfigured the tundra like boils. These masses of pure ice got shoved up through the soil by the freeze-thaw cycle, in effect floating up to the surface. When the pingos melted they left round ponds on top of low hills, an odd sight. The methane released to the atmosphere in this process was prodigious.

Often visible on the tundra, as gatherings of black dots, were herds of de-extincted mammoths. Even if you thought they were pseudo-mammoths, they were still very impressive. They looked like black ants swarming over the land; there had to be thousands of them, maybe millions. Good in some ways, bad in others. Population dynamics again. If those dynamics were the only factors involved, over time they would sort themselves. Meaning these mammoths might be headed for a crash, but it was hard to tell. Meanwhile they at least took the stupid ivory pressure off elephants.

Really, she thought as she looked down, despite everything, the world looked good. Maybe flying in the dark helped. Maybe the shores of the Arctic Ocean were benefiting from the warmer climate. If they succeeded in chilling the climate back down by some way or other, this region would be screwed, maybe. So hard to say.

So Amelia passed these days looking down at the world, and as she did she tried to think things through. What that seemed to mean was that she got more and more confused. This was what always happened when she tried to think, which was why she was not fond of it. She trusted there were other people who were better at it, although sometimes she wondered about that, and in any case, whether or not they existed, their existence did not help her. Everything people could do in the world at this point had a rebound of secondary and tertiary effects. Everything cut against everything else. It was not so much a weave as a mangle. Why had her teachers told her ecology was a weave, when actually it was a train wreck?

She searched her wristpad and brought up a recording of her undergraduate advisor at the University of Wisconsin, an evolution and ecology theorist named Lucky Jeff, whose voice even now had the power to soothe her. In fact that power in person had been so immense that she had slept through most of his classes. Still, he was what she needed now, his calmness. She had liked him, and he had liked her. And he had usually kept things simple.

“We like to keep things simple,” he said to begin the lecture she chose first, which made her smile. “In reality things are complex, but we can’t always handle that. We usually want there to be one master rule. Pöpper called that monocausotaxophilia, the love of single causes that explain everything. It would be so nice to have that single rule, sometimes. So people make them up, and give them authority, like they used to give authority to kings or gods. Maybe now it’s the idea that more is better. That’s the rule that underlies economic theory, and in practice it means profit. That’s the one rule. It’s supposed to allow everyone to maximize their own value. In practice it’s put us into a mass extinction event. Persist in it, and it could wreck everything.

“So what’s a better master rule, if we have to have one? There are some candidates. Greatest good of the greatest number is one possibility. If you remember the greatest number is one hundred percent, and includes everything, that one works pretty well. It suggests creating something like a climax forest. And it has a long history in philosophy and political economy. There are some bad interpretations of it, but that will be true of any rule. It’s serviceable as a first approximation.

“One I like better comes from right here in Wisconsin. It’s one of the sayings of Aldo Leopold, so it’s sometimes called the Leopoldian land ethic. ‘What’s good is what’s good for the land.’

“This one takes some pondering. You have to derive the consequences that would follow from it, but that’s true of any master rule. What would it mean to take good care of the land? It would encompass agriculture, and animal husbandry, and urban design. Really, all our land use practices. So it would be a way of organizing our efforts all around. Instead of working for profit, we do whatever is good for the land. That way we could hope to pass along a good place to the generations after us.”

As Amelia listened to this, wondering if any of it was true, or if it could help her if it were, she was looking down at Kamchatka. The dark land below her was studded with white-sloped volcanoes, but some were black, because their sides were so hot they melted the snow that fell on them. Bizarre to see land so hot that snow melted on it. The lower land around the volcanoes was thickly forested, and white with snow. There were a few towns, scattered like giant navigational beacons, but it was easy to imagine that the habitat corridors they were working so hard to establish in North America were the natural order of things here. Was Kamchatka lightly populated? Had the Russians done things better? She had thought the Russians were crazy despoilers of their country. But maybe that was the Chinese. The Chinese had definitely wrecked their land. Maybe their rule had reversed the Leopold rule, and been What’s good is what’s good for people. That was maybe what people meant when they talked about the greatest good for the greatest number—number of people, they meant. What Leopold had been saying was that taking care of the land took better care of people, over the long haul. Kamchatka, magnificent, bizarre—alien—like another world: was it doing well? She had no idea.

Then over the Aleutians, and then over Canada, where she saw more and more other aircraft in the skies around her. There had been some giant robot freighter airships over Siberia, but the midwinter dark kept a lot of small craft out of the sky, or headed south. Now she was seeing all kinds of airships lighting the sky like lanterns, including a bevy of skyvillages, floating along at the seven-thousand-foot level, the altitude that was generally kept clear for them. Amelia loved skyvillages. They were round or polygonal collections of balloons, often actually a single ring of a balloon made to look like a circle of old-style balloons, holding aloft under them (or it) platforms on which complete little villages were built, in some cases even towns of a few or several thousand people. Thirty to fifty balloons, or units of a single balloon, held each skyvillage aloft, with the smaller resort versions displaying twenty-one balloons, as in the children’s book The Twenty-one Balloons. People spoke very highly of life in these villages, and Amelia always enjoyed her visits to them. They included farms, and some had so much surface area and so few people that they were almost entirely self-sufficient, like the townships on the ocean, so that they hardly ever came down.

Amelia was now flying at around ten thousand feet, so the skyvillages she saw below her looked like flower arrangements, or cloisonné jewelry. Canadians in particular liked to fly or live in them. Her cloud show was popular in many of them, she had been told, although a little research had revealed that liking her show appeared to be a kind of campy thing, indulged in by young people who liked to laugh. Oh well. An audience was an audience.

Apparently people were beginning to wonder why she wasn’t broadcasting. Nicole told her that daily. People were aware she was flying but not broadcasting. Rumors had it that she was traumatized by the death of the polar bears. Well, so what? It was true. Something like true. She couldn’t characterize how she felt. It was new, it was unpleasant. Maybe it was trauma, sure. She didn’t know. Maybe feeling stunned was part of being traumatized. But she had always felt a little stunned, she realized. A little distant, a little removed. She had hated aspects of her childhood so much that she had gone off to be alone whenever she could, and as that seemed to help, inside herself she was always a bit removed. A few seconds behind whatever happened to her, or happened in front of her. Had she always been traumatized? And if so, by what?

She didn’t know. Her mother was an obvious candidate, but then again her mother hadn’t been that bad. Just your ordinary stage mom, in fact, so why had she reacted so badly to all that? What was wrong with her that made her want so badly to get away from everyone? Was it just that the world was fucked, that people saw that and didn’t change, that they didn’t give a shit? Or was it something in her, something wrong with her?

Now again she was a bit behind what she was actually seeing, because one of the skyvillages below her was tilted sideways and spinning slowly down toward the Earth. “Frans, what’s with that skyvillage down there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Its balloons! It looks like they’ve popped?”

“Where are you looking, please?”

Amelia took the controls and headed down after the distressed aircraft. “Go as fast as you can!” she cried.

“Going.”

Amelia piloted, and Frans took over propulsion and ballast, and also established contact with the skyvillage, which was now putting out a mayday. Half of its balloons had popped all at once, and in the abrupt tilt everything aboard it had been thrown into chaos. They were dropping fast, not refrigerator fast, but with considerable negative buoyancy. They were just now pulling themselves off the tilted walls of their buildings and trying to get a grip on the situation, but had not achieved that, obviously. In fact they sounded desperate.

After her recent adventure putting the Assisted Migration on the vertical to deal with the bears, Amelia could well imagine the chaos. “Get down there,” she told Frans. “Spill more helium now. Come on, go. Go!”

“At our current speed we will intersect them while they are still approximately a thousand feet above the ground.”

“Good. How can we hook onto the side of them that’s lost its balloons?”

“Our grappling hook might serve that purpose.”

“Good. Do it. Go faster.”

“Must be able to reestablish buoyancy when we connect to them.”

“Don’t we have helium reserves in those tanks?”

“Yes—”

“Go faster then! Come on!”

She called down to them and explained her plan. They were happy to hear she had one.

The Assisted Migration dropped toward the sinking skyvillage, much more slowly than Amelia would have liked, even in what seemed to her some kind of slow motion, but in fact they were dropping fast, Frans said. As fast as possible.

“Never forget to film your adventures,” Frans added at one point.

“Fuck that!” she cried. “I hate that! Don’t you dare say things that my production team has programmed you to say!”

“Not sure what I can say then.”

“Then just be quiet! Really, Frans. You’re just reminding me that you’re a program. It’s very disappointing. I say fuck that shit, I hate that shit. You’re just like everyone else.”

Silence from Frans.

When they reached an altitude just above the falling skyvillage and had lowered Amelia’s swing rope with a grappling hook on its end, people on the skyvillage ventured out onto their sharply canted platform, all of them roped and harnessed like climbers, to collect the Assisted Migration’s grapple and hook it to the edge of the village floor, midway around the arc of busted balloons. It was so amazing to see the villagers out there in their harnesses, maneuvering like mountain climbers, that Amelia started to film it.

“Hey people,” she said to the cloud, “this is Amelia, I’m back. Check out what these folks are doing to save their skyvillage. It’s amazing! I hope they are solidly belayed, because they are just hanging there. Now there, look—there they have it. Okay, they’re going to hook our line to their floor, and we’re going to pull them up as much as we can. Frans, get us back to the strongest buoyancy we’ve got.”

“Releasing reserve helium now.”

“And quit sulking. People, Frans is annoyed with me right now, but it’s not my fault. Our producers are manipulative creeps. That includes you, Nicole. But for now let’s concentrate on the heroism of our people in trouble down there. Looks like we’ve got enough loft to pull up the side of the village that lost its balloons. I heard one of them say they thought a meteorite shot through that arc of their balloon circle. Anyway, they’re almost back to level. We’ll let them down at—at where, Frans? Where’s a good big airfield we can help them down onto?”

“Calgary.”

“We’re descending on Calgary, folks. Look how they’re having to play with the balloons they still have, to get themselves level. Yikes! I bet their homes are all messed up inside. I know we were here when we went vertical. None of us likes it when that happens. Which reminds me—all of you should join the Householders’ Union, like today. Check it out, look into it, and join. Because we need to organize, people. We are like that poor skyvillage down there. We are badly out of whack. We are tilted and falling. Headed for a crash. So we need to do some synchronized lifting of each other, to get through the emergency we’re in. Pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Put that message on a repeater, Nicole, and maybe I’ll forgive you. Okay, now everyone just watch while we nail this landing. Frans, nail this landing. Then I’ll forgive you too.”

“Nailing landing,” Frans promised.

“And make a garden wilder than the wild,” Amelia sang, the last line of her show’s theme song, from the great poem by Frederick Turner.

Okay: say the work wasn’t done. Obviously true. Say they had to change their one big rule, if there was to be any chance to make it all work: also true. Fine. She would change the big rule. She would change everything. If she had to fight, she would fight. She was still going to rescue that baby bird and put it back in the air.

h) Inspector Gen

Inspector Gen and Sergeant Olmstead went to talk to the Lower Manhattan Mutual Aid Society’s data analysis team, a group of quanty detectives who were always striving to mine the stacks and the cloud in ways cleverer than the official city and federal teams. Their offices were a kind of shabby decrepit office located at 454 West Thirty-fourth, just north of the intertidal, in an old brownstone among brownstones, most of which had been hollowed out and turned into fronts for towers ten times higher than they were. This preserved the street look while also rendering the neighborhood quite bizarre, a place where alien metal claws seemed to have unsheathed themselves out of the old brick flesh.

In this mélange of old and new, the brownstone called the Wolf Den was easy to miss but nevertheless one of the great nodes of the metropolis, housing as it did most of the Lame Ass’s data miners. Gen followed Olmstead through their security with the gloomy sensation she always had when entering this bastion of big data. To her data analysis was the ugly love child of science and Kafka, always either proving the sky was blue or demonstrating the truth of something deeply wrong or, to be more precise, radically counterintuitive to Gen Octaviasdottir. And Gen was all about intuition. So this was a tool that cut her as much as the material she was working on. Nevertheless it was often useful, or at least useful to Olmstead. And Olmstead was useful to her.

They conferred with some of Sean’s frequent partners. River surface temperature data, available to everyone, showed that the area above the Cypress Avenue subway station had warmed in the days immediately before the two coders from the Met had been kidnapped. Okay, so far so good: the sky was blue.

The container itself had been harder to track, but here was where the Wolves shone; they had a huge cache of Chinese data, basically everything the Chinese government had kept from their own people through the twenty-first century, stolen all at once in a hilarious countercoup that formed the plot for Chang’s great opera Monkey Bites Dragon. In this Chinese archive the Lame Ass team had been able to locate the very container in which Mutt and Jeff had been imprisoned. It had been built in China, like almost all the containers on the planet, some 120 years before. This one’s travels had been the usual oceanic zigzag until the late 2090s, when containerclippers had finished superseding diesel-powered ships. By then smaller composite containers had taken over as the standard unit of shipping and land transport, and the old steel containers had been retired and turned into housing and land storage. This particular container had then dropped out of the tracking systems. It hadn’t been possible to find out where it had been for the last half century; most likely it had rested right in one of the drowned parking lots of the south Bronx, very near the Cypress subway station.

The FBI’s surveillance systems, also somehow available to these guys, showed that in the two weeks prior to the kidnapping, Henry Vinson had met several times with two people associated with Pinscher Pinkerton, out on a dock and inside a mobile Faraday cage, so that they had not been recorded. Here, as the analysts put it, they were entering the octopus’s garden. When Vinson and the Pinscher people had met, the FBI surveillance had spotted someone else also surveilling their meeting, and those other surveillors looked like they had gotten a recorder inside the Faraday cage on that dock, thus probably successfully recording them. But who the other surveillors had been, the FBI had not been able to determine.

Pinscher Pinkerton appeared to have no physical offices anywhere. Its finances were based in Grand Cayman, and its name only appeared in the cloud from time to time, mostly in messages where its encryption had failed. The Lame Ass cryptographers had pickpocketed some of its encryption the year before, but Pinscher had detected the pick and moved on. What the analysts had recovered before that move showed nothing at all concerning the kidnapping of Rosen and Muttchopf, but they had found evidence of contacts with another sucker on that leg of the octopus, a group implicated in three corporate assassinations. This was what had earned that whole octopus leg an F from the FBI and put them on the Ten Worst list. Murder for hire, as simple as that. Rosen and Muttchopf’s names could be in some of these data, but if they had been given code names that hadn’t been figured out, that might explain why they hadn’t appeared on any of these lists. As it stood, the evidence the analysts had was not enough to convince the city to go after a World Trade Organization warrant to search Pinscher’s files in the cloud.

“Damn,” Gen said. “But I want to go after them.”

Vinson’s offices, however, the FBI had cracked quite easily. Here there was a record of the hiring of Rosen and Muttchopf, also of a contact with Pinscher for personal security consultations. These were public filings, in effect. The Lame Ass analysts had also snatched some dark pool diving algorithms out of the dark pools themselves; these had been tagged by Jeff Rosen as being his work, and they stuck to other algorithms he had spotted in the dark pools. He had indeed inserted a covert channel into a pool connected to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Taken together these findings might constitute enough probable cause to get a warrant issued from the SEC to search further in Vinson’s files.

Gen pondered her options now by running various scenarios past Sean Olmstead, who served as her whiteboard in the absence of a real one. If they got a warrant and used it, they might find evidence of Vinson hiring Pinscher to stash away the troublesome cousin and his partner. If Jeff had been seeing only the tip of the iceberg, in terms of illegal market manipulation, sequestering him and his partner could have saved Vinson from years in prison, or at least an inconvenient slap on the wrist.

“Why wouldn’t he have them killed?” Olmstead asked.

“But, you know, if he wanted to stop short of that. Family or whatnot.”

Olmstead nodded uncertainly. “You don’t have any of these connections established very well.”

“But with a warrant we could find what they were doing.”

“You think?”

“Maybe not. But we might scare them into doing something stupid.”

“You like to try that,” Olmstead noted, tapping nervously on the table as he thought it over. Jazzy fingernail riffs, indicating uncertainty. “You always think you can scare them, flush them from cover.”

“Exactly. They’re almost always doing some bad stuff. They think they’re great business minds, running rings around the SEC, but a visit from a police inspector with a warrant can freak them out.”

“They consider their exposures and try to reduce them.”

“Exactly. The guilty flee where woman pursueth. And sometimes we then build a case built entirely on them doing something new and stupid.”

“Substituting for what you suspect but can’t prove.”

“Exactly!”

“But, you know, when they recognize the trick and hold fast, then you’ve just tipped your hand. That’s happened a lot. The trick is kind of an old trick by now. A hokey old cliché, if I may be so bold.”

Gen sighed. “Please, youth. I still want to try it. Because I like to make people mad. Because logic flies out the window when you’re mad.”

“Are you talking about them or about you? Okay, sorry. Might as well see if we can get a warrant. I can tell you want to.”

“You’re a mind reader.”

They got the warrant from the SEC’s cloud control panel. Olmstead called Lieutenant Claire to ask for a ride, and she soon arrived at Pier 76 off the Javits Center in a small speedboat, accompanied by a clutch of New York’s finest, fraud division, wearing civvies. They proceeded north to the Cloisters dock, tied off, and took the broad promenade stairs up to the cluster’s giant plaza.

Space itself was different up here: bigger, higher, more spacious. People eyed them as they passed—three officers in uniform, a gaggle of followers in civvies—raid! Vice squad! All the old instincts kicked in as this posh neighborhood was revealed by the spooked looks in people’s eyes to be only the latest in a long line of fashionable scam zones. It made Gen happy to stroll purposefully along, as if marshaling a tiny parade.

Then into the massive base of the fattest tower, flashing badges at their security.

“We’re here to speak to Henry Vinson, at Alban Albany,” Gen said to the building security people.

“Do you have an appointment?” they asked.

“We have a warrant.”

Gen chewed vigorously to pop her ears on the way up to the fiftieth floor, which was fairly low in the tower, where the floors were largest. She and Olmstead and Claire and the fraud forensics team emerged from the elevator and headed to the Alban Albany reception desk, where a little clot of people awaited.

“I want to speak to Henry Vinson,” Gen said, showing them the warrant.

One of the receptionists gestured at her phone and Gen said, “Yes, go ahead,” and she pinged Vinson and said that there was a policewoman to see him.

“Send her in,” came the reply.

“Come on in,” said Henry Vinson from the middle of a vast open floor, window-walled on all sides. Five six, Anglo, balding blond, looked younger than his age, which she knew was fifty-three. Tight small mouth, thin skinned, very well groomed and tailored. Like an actor playing a chief executive officer, but this, Gen found, was almost always true of CEOs. “How can I help you?” he said.

“I’m here to ask you about your cousin Jeff Rosen,” Gen said. “He and another man were taken and held against their will recently. City systems are showing us that you had several consultations with your company’s security contractor, Pinscher Pinkerton, at the time of their kidnapping. And Rosen and his partner worked for you twice in the last ten years. So we’re wondering if you can tell us when you last saw them.”

“I’m surprised to hear about this,” Vinson said, looking affronted. “I know nothing about it. We’re an investment firm in good standing with the SEC and the city. We would never engage in illegal practices.”

“No,” Inspector Gen agreed. “That’s what makes this pattern so disturbing. Possibly there may be rogue elements in Pinscher, doing things you don’t know about that they think you might approve of.”

“I doubt that.”

“When did you last see your cousin, Jeff Rosen?”

Vinson looked annoyed. “I’m not in touch with him.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“I don’t know. Several years ago.”

“When was the last time you were in contact with him?”

“The same. As I said, we haven’t been in touch. His mother and my father have both been dead for years. When we were young we never associated except at holidays. So I know who you mean, but beyond that, there’s no connection to speak of.”

“But he worked for your company.”

“Did he?”

“You weren’t aware he worked for your company? Is it that big?”

“It’s big enough,” he said. “The computer division does its own personnel work. They might have hired him without me knowing about it.”

“So you don’t know why he was let go.”

“No.”

“But you seem to know he worked in computers.”

“I knew that, yes.”

“Did you know he worked in high-frequency trading codes?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Does your firm do high-frequency trading?”

“Of course. Every investment firm does.”

Gen paused a beat, to let that remark reverberate a little. “Not true,” she pointed out. “Yours does, but not all do. It’s a specialty.”

“Well, a specialty,” Vinson said, again annoyed. “Everyone has to keep up with it one way or another.”

“So your firm does it.”

“Yes, as I said.”

“And your cousin was working on your systems, and may have seen evidence of illegal practices.”

“That’s not possible, because we trade within the rules set by the SEC. And as I said, I haven’t been in contact with him myself for over ten years.”

“Can you recall the last time you were in touch with him?”

“No. It wouldn’t have been consequential. Maybe when his mother died.”

“That wasn’t consequential?”

“Not in terms of work. Come on. I’ve nothing more to say about this. Are you finished here?”

“No,” Gen said. “My team is here to search your records, and anything your people send to the cloud from this point on is subject to interdiction.”

“No. I think not. I think you’re finished here.”

“What do you mean?”

A big team of men in security uniforms entered the room, and Vinson gestured at them. “I’ve answered your questions out of politeness, but I won’t allow our confidentiality to be breached. I don’t believe that your warrant is valid. These security officers are here to escort you from the building, so please cooperate with them and leave now.”

“You’re kidding,” Gen said.

“Definitely not. Leave the building now, please. These security officers will see you out.”

Gen pondered. “All this is being recorded, of course.”

“Of course. If it comes to that, we’ll meet in court. For now, please cooperate with the security rules of our building.”

Gen looked at Lieutenant Claire, who shrugged; nothing to be done. Gen said, “We are leaving under protest, registered here and now. You’ll be hearing from us again about this.” Then she left the room, followed by her people, and then the building security team. The elevator was crowded.

When the elevator doors opened they crossed the vast windy plaza and stepped down the broad steps to the dock.

When they were on the police boat, Gen said, “Those fuckers.”

Claire said, “I planted mayflies all over the building. Maybe some of them will hide and hear something.”

Olmstead was still red with bulldog indignation; the bone had been snatched away from his jaws.

“Good work,” Gen said to Claire. “We’ll have to hope for the best. Keep surveilling everyone who was in the building, and their cloud connections, and we’ll see if we spooked something beyond just a questionable eviction. At the very least we might be able to hurt them for that.”

“I hope so.”

Both Claire and Olmstead were looking furious. Gen wondered if that would be the only good result she would get out of this move. They were young, and now they were mad. They would be on the hunt.