Kim Robinson - New York 2140

When he was out of the wetsuit, and had sprayed down his face and neck with bleach, and washed that off and dried himself and gotten back in his civvies, he called his old friend Armando from Lame Ass’s submarine services. “Hey Mando, can you pop over and take a look at my building? I got a couple of leaks.” Mando agreed to schedule him in. “Thanks.”

He looked at the photos on his pad, then turned to his screens and called up the building’s leak records. Also, after some hesitation, the building’s security cameras.

Nothing obvious. But then again, after checking his log: there was nothing recorded on the basement cameras, even on days when people had definitely gone into those sub-basement rooms, as recorded in the logs.

Often after a dive he felt queasy, everyone did from time to time; they said it was nitrogen buildup, or anoxia, or the toxic water with all its organics and effluents and microflora and fauna and outright poisons, the whole chemical stew that made up the city’s estuarine flow, my God! It made you sick, that was just the way it was. But today he felt sicker than usual.

He called up Charlotte Armstrong. “Charlotte, where are you?”

“I’m walking to my office, I’m almost there. I walked the whole way.” She sounded pleased with herself.

“Good. Hey, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like someone is sabotaging our building.”

Amelia’s airship the Assisted Migration was a Friedrichshafen Deluxe Midi, and she loved it. She had called the autopilot Colonel Blimp at first, but its voice was so friendly, helpful, and Germanic that she switched to calling it Frans. When she ran into trouble of one sort or another, which was the part of her programs that her viewers loved the most, especially if the trouble somehow lost her her clothes, she would say, “Oh, Frans, yikes, please do a three-sixty here and get us out of this!” and Frans would take over, executing the proper maneuver whatever it might be, while making a heavy joke, always almost the same joke, about how a 360-degree turn would only get you going the way you were already going. Everyone had heard it by now, so it was a running joke, or a flying joke as Frans called it, but also, in practical terms, part of a problem solved. Frans was smart. Of course he had to leave some decisions to her, being judgment calls outside his purview. But he was surprisingly ingenious, even in what you might have called this more human realm of executive function.

The blimp, actually a dirigible—if you acknowledged that an internal framework could be only semirigid or demirigid, made of aerogels and not much heavier than the gas in the ballonets—was forty meters long and had a capacious gondola, running along the underside of the airship like a fat keel. It had been built in Friedrichshafen right before the turn of the century and since then had flown many miles, in a career somewhat like those of the tramp steamers of the latter part of the nineteenth century. The keys to its durability were its flexibility and its lightness, and also the photovoltaic outer skin of the bag, which made the craft effectively autonomous in energy terms. Of course there was sun damage eventually, and supplies were needed on a regular basis, but often it was possible to restock without landing by meeting with skyvillages they passed. So, like the millions of other similar airships wandering the skies, they didn’t really ever have to come down. And like millions of other aircraft occupants, for many years Amelia had therefore not gone down. It had been a refuge she had needed. During those years there had seldom been a time when she couldn’t see other airships in the distance, but that was fine by her, even comforting, as it gave her the idea of other people without their actual presence, and made the atmosphere into a human space, an ever-shifting calvinocity. It looked as if after the coastlines had drowned, people had taken to the skies like dandelion seeds and recongregated in the clouds.

Although now she saw again that in the polar latitudes the skies were less occupied. Two hundred miles north of Quebec she spotted only a few aircraft, mostly big freighters at much higher altitudes, taking advantage of their absence of human crews to get up into the bottom of the jet stream and hurry to their next rendezvous.

As they approached Hudson Bay, Frans dove steeply, altering their pitch by pumping helium around in the ballonets and by tilting the flaps located behind the powerful turbines housed in two big cylinders attached to the sides of the craft. Together these actions shoved their nose down and sent them humming toward the ground.

The October nights were growing long up here, and the frozen landscape was a black whiteness to every horizon, with the icy gleam of a hundred lakes making it clear just how crushed and then flooded the Canadian shield had been by the great ice cap of the last ice age. It looked more like an archipelago than a continent. Near dawn, a glow of light on the horizon to the north marked the town they were visiting: Churchill, Manitoba. As they dropped over the town and headed for its airship field, they saw it was a desolate little knot of buildings, far enough down the western shore of Hudson Bay that it got no traffic from the busy Northwest Passage, except for an occasional cruise ship visiting in the hope of seeing whatever polar bears might remain.

Which were hardly any. This was mainly because the bears were now stuck on land every year from the breakup of the sea ice in the spring until it refroze in the fall, a disappearance that kept the bears away from the seals, which were their main source of food. That meant they were so hungry they never had triplets, nor hardly twins, and when they came through town to see if they could walk on the new sea ice yet, they also looked around to see if there was anything to eat in town. This pattern had existed for over a century, and the town’s Polar Bear Alert Program had long ago worked out a routine to deal with the October influx of bears headed for the newly frozen ice, tranquilizing ursine trespassers and blimping them in nets to a point downcoast where early ice and seals both tended to congregate. This year, rather than blimping all the trespassers out of town, the program officers had kept their holding tank full, with the idea that some of these jailed bears, the most obnoxious in the region, had self-selected to be the ones to get airlifted much farther south than usual.

After Frans attached to an airship mast at the edge of town and was pulled to the ground by a local crew, Amelia got out and greeted a clutch of locals. Actually it was very close to the total population of the town, she was told. Amelia shook everyone’s hand and thanked them for hosting her, filming all the while with a swarm of camera flies. After that she followed them across town to the holding tank.

“We’re approaching the polar bear jail in Churchill,” Amelia voice-overed unnecessarily as she filmed. Her team was not sending this out live, so she felt more relaxed than usual, but was also trying to be conscientious. “This jail and its animal control officers have saved literally thousands of polar bears from untimely death. Before the program was started, an average of twenty bears a year were shot dead to keep them from mauling people here in town. Now it’s a rare year when any bear has to be shot. When they get through a season with no bear deaths, a gigantic polar bear snowman is built to celebrate the achievement by the human citizens of the town.”