David Brin - Existence

“You know I can’t do that,” Bin complained, squeezing the callused soles of both feet against one of the poles that propped his home above the risen waters. His tug made the mesh bag sway toward Shi. “That camera buoy over there… it knows I raised ninety kilos. If I dump, I’ll be fined!”

“Cry to the north wind,” the merchant scolded, using his pole to push away from the ruined villa. His flat-bottom vessel shifted while eels grazed its mossy hull. “Call me if you salvage something good!”

“But-”

“Tell you what,” Shi said. “I’ll take the peebag off your hands. Phosphorus prices are up again.” He held out a credit slip of low denomination. Peng Xiang Bin snatched it up and tossed the bulging, black evaporator sack, hoping it would split and spill concentrated urine across the old man’s feet. Alas, the membrane held.

Bin watched helplessly as Shi spoke a sharp word and the dory’s motor put it in motion. Audible voice commands might be old-fashioned in the city. But out here, you couldn’t afford subvocal mistakes. Anyway, old-fashioned was cheaper.

Muttering a curse upon the geezer’s sleep, Bin tied the rope and left his salvage hanging for the cameras to see. Clambering the strut, then vaulting a gap, he landed on the villa’s roof-once a luxury retreat worth two million New Hong Kong Dollars. Now his, if he could work the claim.

It would have been easier in olden times, Bin knew from the dramas Mei Ling made him watch each night as they lay exhausted in their webbery-bed. Back when everybody had big families and you were part of an extended clan, all knotted like a fishing net. Cousins helping cousins.

Sure, people back then possessed no tech-wonders. But I’d have had contacts in town-some relative I could sell my salvage to. And maybe a rich uncle wise enough to invest in a daring, seashore property.

Well, one could dream.

Bin lowered his straw hat and scanned the horizon, from Old Shanghai’s distant towers across Greater and Lesser Pudong-where one could just make out amusement rides at the Shanghai Universe of Disney and the Monkey King-then past the great seawall and Chongming Island’s drowned nature preserve, all the way to where the widening Huangpu met the East China Sea. The broad waters lay dotted with vessels of all kinds, from massive container ships-tugged by kite-sails like billowing clouds-down to gritty dust-spreaders and fishing sampans. Much closer, the in-tide pushed at a double line of ruined houses where he and several hundred other shoresteaders had built hammock-homes, swaying like cocoons in the stiff breeze.

Each former mansion now stood alone, an island jutting from the rising sea, so near the city, and yet so far away in every practical sense.

There may be a storm, Bin thought he could smell it.

Turning, he headed across the roof. Here, the glittering city lay just a few hundred meters ahead, beyond the new surfline and a heavy, gray barrier that bore stains halfway up, from this year’s high-water mark. A world of money and confident ambition lay on the other side. Much more lively than Old Shanghai, with its lingering afterglow from Awfulday.

Footing was tricky as he made his careful way between ancient-style clay tiles and solar panels that he hoped to get working again, someday. Bin stepped gingerly among broad, lenslike evaporation pans that he filled each morning, providing trickles of fresh water and voltage, plus salt to sell in town. Wherever the weight could be supported, garden boxes recycled organic waste into herbs and vegetables. Too many shoresteaders lost their claim by carelessly dropping poo into the bay.

One could fall through crumbling shingles and sodden plywood, so Bin kept to paths that had been braced since he took over this mess of tilting walls and crumbling stucco. This dream of a better life. And it can be ours, if luck comes back to stay a while.

Bin pinched some greens to bring his wife, while doing a quick visual check of every stiff pipe and tension rope that spanned the roof, holding the hammock-home in place, like a sail above a ship going nowhere. Like a hopeful cocoon. Or, maybe, a spider in its web.

And, like a spider, Mei Ling must have sensed him coming. She pushed her head out through the funnel door. Her jet-black hair was braided behind the ears and then tied under the chin, in a new, urban style that she had seen on-web.

“Xin Pu Shi didn’t take the stuff,” she surmised.

Bin shrugged, while tightening one of the cables that kept the framework from collapsing. A few of the poles-all he could afford-were durable metlon, driven into the old foundation. With enough time and cash, something new would take shape here, as the old house died.

“Well, husband?” Mei Ling insisted. A muffled whimper, then a cry, told him the baby was awake. “What’ll you do now?”

“The county scrap barge will be here Thursday,” Bin said.

“And they pay dung, ” she answered, picking up little Xiao En. “Are we to live on fish and salt?”

“People have done worse,” he muttered, looking down through a gap in the roof, past what had been a stylish master bathroom, then through a shorn stretch of tiled floor to the soggy panels of a stately dining room. Of course, any real valuables had been removed by the original owners when they evacuated, and the best salvage got stripped during the first year of overflowing tides. A slow disaster that left little for late scavengers, like Peng Xiang Bin.

“Right,” Mei Ling laughed without humor. “And meanwhile, our claim expires in six months. It’s either build up or clean out, remember?”

“I remember.”

“Do you want to go back to slaving in a geriatric ward, wiping drool and cleaning the diapers of little emperors? Work that’s unfit for robots?”

“There are farms, in the highlands.”

“They only allow refugees who prove ancestral connection. But our families were urban, going back two revolutions. Red Guards, bureaucrats, and company men. We have no rural roots!”

Bin grimaced and shook his head, eyes downcast. We’ve been over this, so many times . But Mei Ling continued. “This time, we may not even find work in a geriatric ward. You’ll get drafted into a levee-building crew-maybe wind up buried under their New Great Wall . Then what will become of us?”

He squinted at the monumental barrier, defending the glittery towers of Xidong District against the most implacable invader, worse than any other to threaten China.

“I’ll take the salvage to town,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ll get a better price ashore. For our extra catch, too. Anyway, we need some things.”

“Yeah, like beer,” Mei Ling commented sourly. But she didn’t try to stop him, or mention that the trip was hazardous. Fading hopes do that to a relationship, he thought.

They said nothing further to each other. She slipped back inside. At least the baby’s crying soon stopped. Yet… Peng Xiang Bin lingered for a moment, before going downstairs. He liked to picture his child-his son-at her breast. Despite being poor, ill educated and with a face that bore scars from a childhood mishap, Mei Ling was still a healthy young woman, in a generation with too many single men. And fertile, too.

She is the one with options, he pondered, morosely. The adoption merchants would set her up with a factory job to supplement her womb-work. Little Xiao En would draw a good fee, and maybe grow up in a rich home, with education and implants and maybe…

He chased the thought away with a harsh oath. No! She came here with me because she believed in our dream. I’ll find a way.

Using the mansion’s crumbling grand staircase as an indoor dock, Bin built a makeshift float-raft consisting of a big cube of polystyrene wrapped in cargo net, lashed to a pair of old surfboards with drapery cord. Then, before fetching the salvage, he dived to visit the traps and fishing lines, surrounding the house. By now he felt at home among the canted, soggy walls, festooned with seaweed and barnacles. At least there were a dozen or so nice catches this time, most of them even legal, including a big red lobster and a plump, angry wrasse. So, luck wasn’t uniformly bad.