David Brin - Earth

Ironically, Daisy had been as good as her word. She could tolerate him, if not his views, just so long as he didn’t live in the same house. Shared custody of Claire was handled so easily, Logan had to wonder. Was it because Daisy knew he was a good father? Or because the issue simply didn’t loom as large to her as the latest cause?

“People talk as if the old days of capitalist rapists ended on the beaches of Vanuatu, and with the sack of Vaduz,” she had pronounced just last Sunday, over a dinner of neo-Cajun blackened soycake. “But I know better. They’re still there, behind the scenes, the profiteers and money men. Anti-secrecy laws just drove them undercover.

“All this talk of using tax policy to ‘assess social costs’… what a dumb idea. The only way to stop polluters is to put them against walls and shoot them.”

This from a vegetarian, who thought it murder to harm a perennial plant! At one point during the meal, Logan’s daughter caught his eye. I just have to live with Daisy till college — Claire’s look of commiseration seemed to say — You had to be married to her!

Actually, a part of Logan perversely enjoyed these monthly exposures to Daisy’s fanaticism. Among his engineering peers he so often took the pro-Gaian side in arguments, it was actually refreshing to have the roles reversed occasionally.

Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view.

Take the scene from this levee. Logan found it hard to get excited over simple sewage. It was only biomatter, after all, headed straight for the gulf. Not something really serious, like heavy metals in an aquifer or nitrates in a lake. The brown stuff out there wouldn’t make pleasant drinking water. (Who drank from the Mississippi anyway?) But the ocean could absorb one hell of a lot of fertilizer. No cities lay downstream, so officials looked away when the Old Dame… leaked. New Orleans had special problems anyway.

From atop the splattered dike, Logan spied the massive flood barrier city fathers had built to fight aggressive tidal surges. The price for that impressive edifice lay behind him — a town still elegant and proud, but wracked by neglect.

Logan had toured Alexandria, Rangoon, Bangkok, and other threatened cities, assessing similar panoramas of grandeur and loss. Sometimes his advice had actually helped, like at Salt Lake, where the rising inland sea now surrounded a thriving sunken municipality. More often, though, he came home feeling he’d been battling mud slides with his bare hands. The death of Venice, apparently, hadn’t taught anybody anything.

Sometimes you just have to say good-bye.

Here in New Orleans, earnest men and women worked to save their unique town. He’d recently helped the Urban Corporation anchor seventeen downtown blocks against further sinking into the softening ground. Tonight they were rewarding him with a night in the old French Quarter, still gay and full of life — though now the Dixieland strains echoed off these riverside barricades, and barges rolled by even with wrought-iron balconies.

At one point he just had to get away, for his ringing ears to cool off and the fiery cuisine to settle. Excusing himself, he left to stroll the muggy, jacaranda-scented evening, stepping aside for lovers and wandering groups of Ra Boys on the prowl. The Big Easy had class all right. In decline, there remained an air of seedy blaisance, and even the inevitable bandit types believed in courtesy.

He listened to the barge horns and thought of the manatees that had inhabited this area, back when La Salle’s men first poled their way through endless marshes, trading ax heads for furs. The manatees were long gone, of course. And soon… relatively soon… so would New Orleans.

The dying of any city begins at its foundation. The French had faced a huge expanse of bayous and reed beds where the Mississippi deposited silt far into the Gulf. This posed a problem. You want to build a town at the mouth of a great river, but which mouth ? Natural rivers have many.

They chose the most navigable one, and used a Chippewa word to call it “Mississippi.” But nature paid no heed to names. Channels silted up, and the river kept bulling new paths to the sea.

It was natural, but men found it inconvenient. So they started dredging, saying, “This shall be the main channel, always and forever.”

Dredged mud piled up along the banks of a trough that pushed ever outward, carrying its load of plains dust and mountain sediment deeper into the gulf. Not a fan but a finger, poking mile by mile, year after year, in the general direction of Cuba.

Meanwhile the rest of the delta began eroding.

Logan had inspected hundreds of kilometers of embankments, thrown up in forlorn efforts to save the doomed shore. More tall levees contained the river, whose gradient flattened over time. Suspended silt began falling out even north of Baton Rouge. Soon the sluggish current no longer held back the sea. Salinity increased.

Upstream, the Mississippi fought like an anaconda, writhing to escape. The contest was one of raw power. And Logan knew where it would be lost.

Can you hear it calling ? He asked the captive waters. Can you hear the Atchafalaya, beckoning you ?

Fortunately, Claire would move away long before the Mississippi burst through the Old River Control Structure or some other weak point, spilling into that peaceful plain of cane fields and fish farms. But Daisy? She’d never budge. Perhaps she didn’t believe because the warning came from him, and that made Logan feel vaguely guilty.

In effect, he could only pray the Corps’ new barriers were as good as they claimed. It was possible. Schools now taught youngsters to think in terms of decades, not mere months or years anymore. Maybe that culture had worked its way even to Washington.

But rivers see decades, even centuries, as mere trifles.

The Mississippi rolled by. And, not for the first time, Logan wondered if Daisy might be right after all. I try to find solutions that work with Earth’s forces. I like to think I’ve learned from the mistakes of past engineers .

But didn’t they, too, think they built for the ages?

He remembered what Shelley had written, about an ancient pharaoh.

Now the pyramids of Giza, symbols of man’s conquest of time, were crumbling under the smoggy breath of fifty million denizens of Cairo. The monuments of Ramses were flaking to dust, blowing away to become thin layers in some future geologist’s dissection of the past.

Can we build nothing that lasts? Nothing worth lasting?

Logan sighed. He had been away too long. He turned away from the patient river and took the rusted, creaking iron stairs back into the ancient city.

A man in blue stood near the door of the restaurant, his crewcut and patchy skin exaggerated by the rhodium flicker of the entrance sign. At first, Logan thought the fellow was a Ra Boy in mufti. But a second glance showed him to be too old, and much too formidable to be a Ra Boy.

Normally, Logan would have left out the second glance, but one does look twice when someone steps up and grabs your elbow. Logan blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“No. It’s I who must apologize. You’re Logan Eng, may I assume?”

“Uh… I won’t serve time for keeping it mum.” The flip clichi rolled out before he could regret it, but the sallow-faced man appeared not to notice. He let go of Logan’s arm only as they moved away from the doorway.

“My name is Glenn Spivey, colonel, United States Aerospace Force.”