The Newcomer (Science Fiction Anthologies, #1) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: scifi, Science Fiction, Anthology, milsf, Military science fiction, Dystopian, Post-Apocalyptic, Space Opera, stasis, Short Story, collection, boxed set
Publisher: Alasdair Shaw
Published: 2016-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

What Make is Your Cat?

by Richard Crawford

The air-tube climbed slowly over the lagoon, a glass worm oozing into the sky. Beneath the rails, Atlantis-London shimmered, an expanse of glassy manmade lagoons, blue water topped by glistening steel and glass towers reaching into the clouds. In contrast, the Tower of London squatted like a toad on its moat-bordered island. St Paul’s a ghostly presence pearlescent beneath its sea dome. Water lapped at the rooftops of unsaved buildings, eating the past.

I’m too young to remember what London looked like before the flood. Weird to think, in my granddad’s day people went around in tunnels beneath the ground, like moles or worms. I’d never seen real a worm or a mole, only pictures. Most of the animals were lost in the flood; a few mutated into something different, but that’s not a good story.

Dad told me about the old London, the view from the Shard: how Granddad proposed to Gran there. He wanted to do the same when he asked Mum to marry him, but he couldn’t afford the entrance fee. They were all gone, and the view from the top of the Shard was nothing special now. I looked south to where it rose glittering from the waters, lower levels sealed and submerged. Dwarfed by the new cloud towers.

“What make is your cat?”

It took me a moment to realize the girl was asking me a question.

“Huh?”

“Your cat,” the girl said, with that special clarity and patience the rich reserved for plebs; not that there are many of us left in Atlantis-London. “What make is it?”

I stared, taking her in properly for the first time. Her head, shaved close to leave only the finest golden stubble, was enough to suggest she was a swimmer. The aqua shorts and tiny breathing apparatus she wore confirmed it. Multihued tattoos covered her arms and breasts; her skin still glittered with drops of water, though it was drying rapidly in the air-conditioned carriage. A pair of gossamer thin, pearly hued flippers lay by her feet.

I realized she must have boarded the air-tube at the Tower Bridge aerostation. I hadn’t even noticed a bare breasted swimmer-girl dripping next to me. That’s how much things had changed. The old social paradigms and wiring were slowly dying. No point assessing what would never be available. I wondered what Granddad would have made of it.

Not everyone was a swimmer. Extreme swimming began as a new fitness craze; you couldn’t jog outdoors in Atlantis-London, and it quickly developed a class status. It was one of the quickest ways to get around Atlantis-London (Londoners hated the name but AtlantisCorp had insisted, after all it was their money that saved the city), and just as London and its buildings had adapted to the flood, swimmers had developed their own fashion conventions, and some said they were evolving physically too.

The Mayor had tried to ban swimmers from going topless, but she’d been fighting a losing battle. Swimmers were the new elite, invariably fit and healthy,

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