Worldwired by Elizabeth Bear

Author:Elizabeth Bear
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 9780553587494
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2012-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

Min-xue's nervousness didn't betray itself in a shaking hand, although his palms were sweating. His face was impassive, his emotions carefully sealed away, and if the palms of his hands were slick with sweat, no one would ever know.

What gave him away was that he was talking to Richard in Cantonese, because he couldn't think of the words he wanted in English. Which made it difficult to talk to Jen or to Patty, seated across the aisle in the luxury of the Canadian wide-bodied jet that was descending, ear-poppingly, toward New York. The pilot had swung wide over the Atlantic and they were still high enough to see what Richard said was the shoreline of Connecticut and Long Island Sound; the pilot was giving them the view.

There was plenty to look at. Filtered sunlight fractured on the waters of the Atlantic, a sparkle eased by polarized glass. Min-xue squinted anyway, unlacing one hand to shade his eyes. He understood that the entire downtown area of New York City had been an island within living memory, in much the manner of Hong Kong. Now, Richard supplied the names for the geographic features he was looking at, and images of what it had looked like before, for the sake of comparison. Dikes and landfill bulwarked large portions of what had been New York Harbor, and what had once been called the East River had been pumped dry. New York Harbor itself was enclosed by a ponderous seawall and a series of locks that allowed ships to move from the higher waters of the Atlantic into the ancient port. Richard said the harbor was largely fresh now, from the outflow of the Hudson River. The seaward ends of the narrow bands of water that separated Long Island and Staten Island from the mainland had been sealed up, and the seaward faces of the islands protected by more dikes and seawalls.

The bobbing shapes of tidal generators dotted the waters of the Atlantic outside the seawall. “Those power the pumping stations that keep the groundwater down inside the dike. Manhattan's on schist—it's bedrock, but Long Island is a glacial moraine. Soft.”

Don't the foundations crack?

“It's a screaming mess down there—”

Min-xue felt an extended lecture coming on, and scrambled for a better question. Where's the Statue of Liberty?

“It's inside the harbor,” Richard said. “You'll need to go to the other side of the plane.”

It should be farther out at sea, Min-xue argued, but he got up and walked across the aisle, to where Jen and Patty were pointing and saying soft, appreciative things.

“Then nobody on land could see it.”

Which was eminently reasonable, but it still disappointed Min-xue somehow that the only waves that lapped the base of the lady with the torch were the wakes of ferries and departing container ships. Foolish romantic.

“If you need romance,” Richard said, his eyebrows wiggling in amusement, “you could consider that the New York Dike is the largest single engineering project in the history of the world, or so they say.”

In terms of earth moved, I wager the Great Wall was bigger.

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