Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
it looks like palmer land and the east antarctic coast are the only habitable areas? so like a giant Greenland, ran by the international agencies
so
1-12 : pre-PoD
13th : same as IOTL
14th : recognises citizenship of ex-slaves
15th : incorporates some rights at state and local levels
16th : same as IOTL
17th : same as IOTL
18th : OTL 20th, but change of term moved to 1 Jan
19th : [retconned] woman suffrage, abolished poll taxes, literacy tests and property qualifications, incorporated the Bill of Rights at state levels
20th? : approximately the ERA. (1960s or 1970s)
21st? : approximately the 26th amendment (early 1970s)
22nd? : approximately the Bricker Amendment (1970s)
23rd? : AV legislative elections (1970s or early 1980s)
24th? : approximately the Hatch Amendment (1990s?)
I swear I remembered the 20 dollar clause amendment... I must have been confusing it with another TL.
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Malêverse 2100: Pathfinder
Diane Hairston sold jewelry in the old Gowanus Mill subway station. She could have got a spot in the new one – she’d been on the vendor list long enough – but why work five hundred feet underground? The new subway had been dug deep into the bedrock where rising water levels wouldn’t affect it, and though the stations were well-lit and full of art, Diane still thought they felt like a tomb. In the old station, the water might stand a foot below the platform, but the city had replaced half the ceiling with clear glass, the walls were covered with vines, the tunnel was lit blue from the glowworms that someone had introduced thirty years ago and no one had been able to get rid of. It wasn’t an antiseptic catacomb; it was a vital place with earthy smells and the buzz of living things, a place where she could work and feel inspired.
Like she did right now, in fact. At the moment, rain was hammering hard on the street above, making patterns on the glass ceiling, heralding the tropical storm that would hit the city in the next hour. Most of the other stalls had closed already and those that hadn’t were being broken down the rowboats that did the glowworm tours were tied up at the other end of the platform, and Diane wondered, as she had throughout the afternoon, whether she ought to close up shop herself. But her fingers danced to the rhythm of the rain, twisting wire into a new pattern, touching it to the pathfinder that mapped and bored nanotubes on and just below its surface, filling them with the fluids that would change patterns and colors as they caught the light. And when the pendant was made and she looked up, a customer was leaning over her stall.
“Thank God you’re here!” the customer said. “I didn’t think I’d find anyplace open before I got home.”
Diane took in the woman in front of her – a decade younger than she was; more or less the same mix of Africa, Europe and Asia; carefully dressed in a way that suggested she followed fashion. Carefully and expensively dressed – someone who lived in the sleek Manhattan towers and had everything, down to her body, custom-made.
“Forgot someone’s birthday?”
“Oh, no,” the customer answered. “There’s a storm party – on the roof, under the dome. I need something that will catch the lightning.”
“A storm party?” Diane repeated. She’d been to a few of those, back before motherhood. She’d never been one of the people who cared to see and be seen, but this customer plainly was.
She held up another spool of wire, and the customer nodded. The wire was plain copper, but that didn’t matter; when gold and platinum were something everyone could afford, it was uniqueness that made the difference. Something new, something made for the day, something no one else would have – that was worth taking a chance on Gowanus Mill with slashing rain and rising winds outside.
Diane shaped the wire quickly, with the expertise of twenty years - a thunderbolt in copper superimposed on a spiral pattern in steel, with the nanotubes mapped fractally into millions of branches and filled with fluid that would react to electric charges in the atmosphere. It was done in fifteen minutes; the customer nodded again and smiled as it changed hands, and her datacloth registered a debit of twelve hundred dollars in favor of Diane. And she was gone, vanished through the doors that led to the elevator and the new station below.
And now it really was time to pack up. Diane saw that she was the only one left, and outside, it was beginning to thunder. That lady wouldn’t have had time to check many more places, she thought; hope she isn’t too late to the party. And then she closed up shop as fast as she could, and hurried to the street before she was too late.
Maybe, she thought a moment later, she’d already waited too long. The rain outside was being driven almost sideways now by winds that must already be forty miles an hour. Diane had plenty of practice with high winds – tropical storms hit New York a lot more often than they used to, usually three or four a year – but Ninth Street was practically a wind tunnel now, and she staggered and fought for balance in the blinding downpour.
At least she had only three blocks to walk – two streets east to Ennis, then off the raised platform of Ninth and into the district where twentieth-century streets had become twenty-first century canals. Her home was on the next corner north, where the Ennis and Eighth Street canals met, and there was a railing on the sidewalk that whole way. She was almost to the place where she could make the turn off Ninth, and then the world exploded.
#
Later, Diane would swear that she heard the explosions go off, but at the time, with the wind screaming in her ear, she could never be sure whether she heard them or only felt them. She wondered why she was suddenly looking up to the thunderclouds, and realized she’d been thrown down on her back without knowing it. The ground was shaking as if in an earthquake – earth, she thought, to add to air and water – and even before it subsided, she heard the alarms begin. It took a moment longer for her to realize that one of the alarms was coming from her datacloth.
She pulled herself to her feet – thankfully, she was unhurt – took shelter in a doorway, and unwound it from around her neck. Report to nearest City Reserve base immediately flashed across its surface, and then, please acknowledge callup and state your location.
“Acknowledged,” she said. She didn’t yet know what had just happened, but if she was being called up, it must be bad. “Ninth and Ennis, Gowanus Mill 78.”
Report to base Ninth and Revel flashed across the cloth, but Diane had already started to make her way there – she knew where the closest reserve base was, even if she’d only had to go there three times in twenty years. It was back the way she’d come, past the subway and over the Gowanus Creek bridge to where the old factories were. She was getting more used to the wind, but it was still hard going, and it seemed she had to fight for every block.
She messaged her son as she passed the station – called up, not sure when I’ll get home. A moment later, she got a message back: me too. Her son was still fifteen, but the emergency medical classes he’d taken put him on the reserve-eligible list.
Go with God, Roger. I love you. Now Diane was sure something terrible must have happened; the city had never in her lifetime called up under-eighteens. At least Roger’s list was limited to non-dangerous duty.
Her own reserve status had no such restriction.
She reached her destination a few minutes later; past the factories that had become apartments and those that had become studios and those that had become nanodesign plants was the one that was now a reserve base. The old loading gate was open and a cheery light came from inside; Diane joined the line of people climbing the steps. The warmth of the factory floor was a blessed change from outside, and someone had already put on a coffee pot; she drew herself a cup, took a chair and waited. She suspected she wouldn’t have to wait long.
She didn’t. She’d had time for just a sip of coffee when Teitelbaum walked down the floor calling her name. She knew who he was from the couple of times they’d met at City Reserve socials, and she’d have recognized him even without that; there weren’t too many people in this part of Brooklyn who wore the full black coat and hat with beard and payot, although she had to admit that on a day like this, that style was more appropriate than most.
“Right here, Avi,” she said – his rank was captain, but few City Reserve members saw much sense in being military about things. She got up and followed him to a small office off what had once been the production floor, and he motioned her to another chair.
“Sit down,” he said. “I think you’ll need to be sitting down. Has anyone told you what happened yet?” He didn’t wait for her to shake her head. “Someone blew the breakwaters.”
Diane took a second to understand, but then she drew in her breath. There had been a seawall along the Atlantic shore for sixty years, but that was only the smallest of the city’s storm defenses; its real protection from storm surges was the system of anchored breakwaters that extended three miles from shore. If someone had blown them up, or even blown some of them up, right in time for the worst storm of the year…
“How did they get bombs in there? How did they get past the security?”
“We’re figuring that out, and when we do, some heads will have a long way to roll. They didn’t beat all the security – there are at least six bombs we know of that didn’t explode – but the corridor to Coney Island and West Rockaway is open, and there’s major damage along the approach to Far Rockaway.”
“That’s…” Diane trailed off, unable to finish the sentence. That put tens of thousands of people in the way of the storm surge, and although there were backup drains on shore, they weren’t built to take the full force of the Atlantic in fury.
“Not good news. And some even better news – we’re now expecting the wind to hit hurricane force. Which is why we’ve got a Dragonfly for you.”
Suddenly it all made sense. Diane had loved the Dragonfly ornithopters as long as she could remember and she’d been licensed to fly them since she was twelve, and although ‘thopters were a minor key in civil aviation, there were a few things they were good for, and rescues and high winds were two of them. A Dragonfly wasn’t very fast and couldn’t carry much, but it didn’t need space to take off and land, it could climb straight up when it had to and hover when it was needed, and it had a flexibility and responsiveness that no helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft could match. And with a hundred thousand people in harm’s way, the city was going to need a lot of them.
“This is the evac zone,” Teitelbaum was saying, and Diane saw that he’d conjured a map of the city in the air above his datacloth and painted a part of it red. “You’ll be bringing people to the shelters. I don’t have the assignments, but once you get up there and they patch you into the net, they’ll tell you where to go. You know where we keep them?”
She did, and that was a dismissal. Back on the floor, knots of other people were moving out as they got their marching orders, on their way to stand up the field hospitals and evac shelters, load supplies on the motor-wagons, or help the sanitation crews manhandle the debris-removal machines. Diane walked past them – through them when she had to – to a back hallway, the ancient freight elevator at its end, and the roof.
The roof platform was dotted with four-winged Dragonflies in the green and white of the City Reserve, with a parapet shielding them from the worst of the wind and rain. A few other people, evidently on the same list Diane was, were pre-tripping their ‘thopters. One of them raised a hand to acknowledge her arrival; she returned the salute, found the nearest free one and did her own checks as quickly as she could.
Then she took the controls, and the Dragonfly leaped into the storm.
#
She climbed fast and climbed high. The leading edge of the eyewall had reached the city now; the wind speed gauge read eighty miles per hour, and in these conditions, she needed height so that a sudden downdraft or crosswind wouldn’t smash her against a building or into the ground. She found an updraft and rode with it into the midnight-dark sky, fighting to keep the ‘thopter steady as rain slashed across the windshield and storm-tossed tree branches struck it from the side.
It’s like sailing, her first instructor had told her a long time ago. You’ll get where you’re going a lot faster if you use the wind than if you fight it. And a Dragonfly’s wings could be adjusted more finely than any sailing ship. Diane put the AI pilot on backup – it wasn’t made for conditions as chaotic as this – and caught the feel of the wind with the sureness of thirty-five years of flying. Her hands moved instinctively across the controls, taking in a wing here and bending one there, changing the wing speed, steadying the ‘thopter amid the maelstrom.
She keyed the net. “Six Four Four outbound.”
“Roger, Six Four Four,” came an answering voice a moment later. “We’ve got you patched in. We’ve got an evac for you in West Rockaway. Sending the coordinates now.”
It took a few more seconds for the assignment to be painted on her map, but she had already turned south and begun searching for a band of wind she could follow. For the first time, she noticed the lights of other Dragonflies, dancing in the air above the city like lightning bugs. She swung west briefly to catch a favorable wind and saw other lights, white and steady this time, from the roof-domes of Manhattan’s towers.
She remembered her customer and the storm-pendant she had made – had that only been two hours ago? – and wondered if she was watching the Dragonflies from one of those domes. The people at that party are getting an even better show than they’d hoped for, she thought, but then, to be fair, unless they’ve been called up themselves. Everyone not already in an emergency-service job was on at least one reserve list, even if only for auxiliary labor. Some of the guests in those roof-domes would have left early. Maybe Diane’s customer was now wearing the pendant as a good-luck charm in a field hospital or out on a repair crew. I’d say a prayer for her if I knew her name, Diane thought, and said a prayer anyway for everyone out there.
The ‘thopter was on a southwest heading now, approaching the salt marsh and the inlet to Grassy Bay, the winds high but steady. Diane could see the scattered lights of the Rockaway peninsula on the other side of the bay, and beyond them, in the far distance, a shadowy barge towing a replacement breakwater into place and the moving lamps of a repair crew on another jetty.
Suddenly there was a much brighter light – a flash that seemed almost to come from underwater – and the barge was listing badly and drifting toward shore. A bomb? A mine? Evidently the six bombs the police had found weren’t all of them, and Diane wondered again how anyone had got them past both human and AI security. And I hope that barge is unmanned.
But there were more immediate things to worry about. She was over Rockaway now and took the Dragonfly down to five hundred feet, scanning for the house she was supposed to evacuate. The air was alive with other ‘thopters, some in City Reserve colors and others in those of the police or fire department, darting down to make their rescues and back up into the storm.
An alarm sounded and she saw that a house just below was illuminated on her windshield map; it was her turn to dart down. This low, the ‘thopter swayed and danced in the crosswinds and she fought to hold it to its course. As she did, she saw that the storm surge had already overtopped the seawall; the streets were under what looked like three feet of water and rising fast.
She hoped she wouldn’t have to land there. Dragonflies could float, but the thought of picking up evacuees while the ‘thopter was being tossed by both air and water was daunting. And fortunately, this evacuee knew what to do. He was on the roof, a bearded man of forty, a bag of necessities under one arm and a young daughter sheltered in the other. She touched down in the shelter of the parapet, and both of them jumped in.
“Anyone else?” she said.
The man shook his head. “My husband’s a cop. He’s probably up there with you.”
“Fair enough.” The Dragonfly leaped into the air again. Diane looked back and saw that the girl was staring out the window in fascination, seemingly without fear of the storm. The man wasn’t doing nearly as well.
“They’re saying it was the Humanity Preservation League,” he said, in tones that suggested he was trying to distract himself as much as inform Diane. “On the radio – they’ve claimed responsibility.”
That makes sense again, in a sick way. The Humanity Law that the city had passed the year before, recognizing as human anyone with genetic stock from the genus Homo, however altered and no matter combined with nanomachines or biomechatronic parts – had made it a target of the more extreme anti-allohumanists. But Diane had never imagined that they would – or could – mount an attack like this…
She couldn’t think too much about that now, though. A tree trunk whipped through the storm, dead in her direction. She dove under it, praying that she could do so fast enough; an instant later, she felt the wet slap of branches and leaves on the Dragonfly’s fuselage as the trunk passed just overhead. The child in the back screamed in delight; her father said nothing, but his white face and clenched knuckles were eloquent.
“Don’t worry,” Diane said. “We’re almost there.” And at that very moment, her map lit up with the location of the evac center, on the Brooklyn side on higher inland ground. She let the AI pilot guide on it while she concentrated on the crosswinds, and then the Dragonfly was down.
“Will you take me back home?” the girl asked.
“I think we’ll take the subway,” her father answered; he thanked Diane and got down from the ‘thopter. He looked ready to kiss the ground.
“Six Four Four light,” Diane told the net, taking to the air again.
“Got it, Six Four Four.” It was a different dispatcher this time. “We need you to go to Coney Island. We’ve got an injured worker on a storm drain maintenance crew, needs a pickup. Sending coordinates.”
“Roger.” Coney Island was less than two miles from where Diane was, but she’d be flying through crosswinds practically the whole way. What followed was by far the worst flight of the night; the storm became turbulent and chaotic as it flowed around the Gravesend arcology, and her only warning of downdrafts was the sight of debris being flung to the ground in front of the Dragonfly seconds before the same would have happened to her. She would wonder later whether she should have taken that as a premonition.
At last the shoreline lay ahead, and the green linking light of her destination. She would have to land on the street this time, and she made a careful descent, checking the water levels and looking for someplace safe and sheltered.
She had just found a landing site when the bomb went off.
It came from the very maintenance tunnel where she’d been sent to make the pickup. It wasn’t a big bomb, not by the standard of the ones that had taken out the breakwaters, but the tunnel entrance channeled the blast upward. It spun the Dragonfly sixty feet above and tossed it into the air, and then the wind smashed it down. There was no time to fight; the cabin filled with foam, and the ‘thopter caromed off the side of a warehouse and hit the ground hard.
#
The first thought to flash through Diane’s mind was that she was alive. The second was that foam or no foam, it hurt like hell. The third was that now there would be two people to pick up.
The foam was dissolving and draining as it was supposed to do after impact, and Diane tried moving her limbs; all of them answered, and nothing seemed to be broken. She was a bit groggy and would have a collection of bruises, but overall, she was lucky. At least, she thought, by certain standards of luck.
“Six Six Four down,” she said. If the comms were working – and wasn’t that a happy thought? – the dispatchers would pick up the signal and send someone to get her. In the meantime…
She could wait. Or she could go to the tunnel and see if she could still help get the injured worker out – no, she ought to do that. If nothing else, she could report back on the condition of the tunnel. The dispatchers would want to know.
She unstrapped and climbed out of the Dragonfly slowly, feeling the shock of cold water on her legs as she lowered herself to the street. The water wasn’t as high here as in Rockaway – more of the breakwaters in this section must be intact – but it was still two feet deep and concealed an uneven surface beneath. She was by the wall of a pumphouse about a hundred feet from the tunnel entrance and she kept a hand on it for support as she pushed into the wind and rain.
The entrance door was blown to hell, but the steps down were still there, and there was a railing to hold onto amid the rushing water. It was three feet deep when she got to the maintenance level, and it was rising steadily; the grill that opened to the storm drain was clogged, or maybe the drain itself was. An alcove, partly sheltered from the blast, held hoses, pumps, drills, borers, and other tools of the trade. The passage to the maintenance catwalk would probably be in the other direction, and it was… but when Diane trained her pocket-light on it, it was filled with rubble. The bomb had collapsed the passage. The workers were on the other side.
Getting that guy out just got a lot harder. And it would get harder still when the access room flooded. Bad enough that the rescuers would have to drill their way through, but if they had to do it underwater…
They won’t take very long to get here – there are enough reservists called up that the dispatchers aren’t triaging. But “not very long” might not be soon enough.
If there were something she could do… there was no way she was shifting that rubble herself, but some of the borers in the alcove looked usable, and as a reservist on callup, she had the emergency access codes. Fire one up, point it in the right direction…
And risk collapsing the rest of the ceiling, maybe the part the maintenance crew is standing under? There wasn’t any way to know which parts of the rubble might be unstable, which ones might bring the whole place down when they were moved…
Or maybe, Diane realized suddenly, there was.
She still had her jewelry tools. Including the one that mapped nanotubes – the one that found pathways through wire and ceramic that wouldn’t compromise their integrity. She’d never imagined using it on something this size, but they said it could find a path through anything.
There was only one way to know. She set the size parameters, pointed it at the rubble, waited while it analyzed the material – cement and steel rebar – and took images; she didn’t know whether they were thermal, sonic, X-ray or all three, but they seemed to satisfy. This will make a hell of a necklace, she thought, and then, all at once, the pathfinder sounded completion and a projection of the rubble appeared above it. The image was an eerie green, with a twisted path marked in red: the safe route through.
From there, of all God’s miracles, things worked. The emergency codes worked. The borer worked – it lifted itself from the water and took the pattern. It lined up, dripping, on the tunnel entrance – above the water line, though maybe not for long – and began its work; it was remarkably fast for equipment that must have sat on the alcove floor for fifty years, and it was only a minute before it fell silent.
Now, Diane had to get herself across. The borer might have cut a tunnel, but it hadn’t smoothed the surface; that was good, because it gave her handholds to pull herself inside, and bad, because it left the rubble rough and sometimes even jagged. She wasn’t more than a foot along before she was sure she wouldn’t get to the other side with all her skin, and by the time she was halfway, she was quite sure.
It was only eighteen feet, though, and soon enough, she saw what was on the other side. A catwalk stretched into the gloom along one side of the fathomless cavern of the storm drain, ending at another collapse about a hundred feet away. Two maintenance workers were still trying to clear it; the other two, a man and a woman, knelt beside a prostrate figure with a bandaged leg lying on the platform. All of them were drenched from the water pouring through the drain, but at least they were in no danger of drowning in it; the catwalk grill let it pass to the depths of the holding tank below.
Of course, drowning isn’t the only peril. The catwalk had partly detached from the wall, either in the initial collapse or the subsequent explosion, and it creaked ominously when Diane set foot on it. A few feet farther on, the grill had broken through, with jagged pieces of steel pointing downward into a twisted hole.
Diane just about had time to take in the scene when the woman on the catwalk – a Mohawk whose family might have been in construction trades for two hundred years – looked up and took in her presence. “We were wondering what all that noise was,” she said, and her face, careworn as it was from the events of the last few hours, had a hint of a smile.
“They sent me to pick him up,” Diane said, nodding at the man on the floor. “I’m not in the best circumstances right now, but there’s about four feet of water in the other room and rising. Do you think we can get him out?”
“I don’t know. Jim’s leg isn’t broken, but he tore it to the bone when he stepped through the catwalk. I’d hate to drag him through that tunnel.”
“I don’t think we have much choice, Sophie,” said Jim, his voice drawn but clear. “If we don’t get out now, I don’t know when we will. Wrap a few more layers around my leg and I can make it.” He grimaced. “I hear they got good doctors in those field hospitals.”
Sophie still didn’t look as if she liked the idea – Diane could hardly blame her – but she also realized there weren’t any better options, and she nodded. “Nnamdi! Xiomara! Drop those tools and let’s get Jim into that tunnel. One in front pulling, one behind to keep his leg clear.” She turned back to Diane. “Why don’t you go first and help lift him out on the other side?”
Something about Sophie’s voice commanded instant obedience, and before she could really think about it, Diane was in the tunnel again feeling her way back. After what seemed much too long a time, she was in the anteroom again; a moment later, Nnamdi came out backwards with his arms locked through Jim’s shoulders, and together, they lifted him and guided him the rest of the way out.
Xiomara came through next, then the man whose name Diane had never learned, and Sophie last of all. They could almost float Jim at this point, and the water did make it easier for them to carry him all together.
“Ready?” asked Sophie.
“Yes,” Diane said, but then, “wait.” She’d felt a couple of loose pieces of rubble at this end of the tunnel, and on a whim, she reached in and took them – a chunk of rebar and a piece of cement that had worn unaccountably smooth. If she was going to make the tunnel into a storm-jewel, she might as well do it, and two were as easy as one.
And then it was time – it was well past time. It took all their strength, even with the railing to anchor on, to pull Jim up the stairs against the rushing waters, but after that, they only had to fight a hurricane, and it got easier. They made it to the downed Dragonfly and did their best to fit into the cabin; the ‘thopter might be crippled, but at least it was warm.
“Six Six Four to base,” said Diane. “I have the injured worker and the maintenance crew, but the ship is down. Do you read?”
For a moment, there was silence, but then a voice crackled from the other end. “We read you, Six Six Four. We sent someone to look for you after you lost signal.”
“We’re gonna need two. Do you have my location?”
“That’s negative. We lost you when you went down.”
“You will in a few seconds.”
Sometimes, thought Diane, the old ways are best. She pulled the flare gun out from under the seat, leaned out of the cabin, and fired three flares into the storm. And a moment later, the dispatcher said, “we got you, Six Six Four. Two incoming.”
And two did come. Sophie and Nnamdi lifted Jim into the first; Diane took her place with the others in the second. She felt the leap into the air, reached by instinct for controls that weren’t there, and then remembered she was a passenger and settled in for the ride.
Diane wasn’t a good passenger. She’d never been one. She felt uncomfortable in a ‘thopter without her hands on the controls, and she had to keep fighting the impulse to tell the pilot what to do. After a while, she thought it best to close her eyes and just listen. The pilot had the radio on, and she hadn’t had a chance to listen to the news since the whole thing started; the newsreader’s voice was soothing against the wind and rain, even if the words he was speaking were not.
… 62 confirmed dead in the first terrorist attack on the city in thirty years… hundreds being treated for blast and storm injuries… police believe that all bombs have been found… unprecedented callup of 200,000 City Reserve members…
Yes, Diane thought, I think I know that part pretty well.
… 91 percent of people in the evacuation zones have reported safe or been taken to shelters, rescue efforts are ongoing…
It’s ongoing all right, thought Diane. It would be ongoing for her in fifteen minutes or so – they’d have a shower and change of clothes waiting at the field hospital, maybe a hot chocolate, and then they’d send her out in another Dragonfly. Nine percent to go.
…This attack will not deter our city, a voice was saying – Diane took a moment to recognize it as the mayor’s. We will continue to be a home to all humanity…
And then the Dragonfly landed, and she realized they were at the Red Hook field hospital and that the other ‘thopter had touched down just before.
The stretcher crew was getting Jim out of the other Dragonfly already; they must have been waiting. With a shock, Diane realized that her son was one of them, but she had no time to call a greeting before they hustled their patient inside. They let Sophie follow, but motioned the others to wait where there was room.
“What should we do?” Nnamdi said.
“I don’t know,” Xiomara answered. “Go dancing?”
The answer wrenched a laugh out of Diane for the first time in hours. Maybe the storm parties were still going on; maybe the famous underground clubs were open, but getting there from here wasn’t happening. There certainly wasn’t a dance floor in the space off the main entrance that had been made into an evac shelter, and she was only interested in finding that change of clothes and shower.
But she never found out where they were. Before she could go further into the shelter, she heard a voice calling “Mom!” and saw Roger running toward her, still in scrubs. Someone must have told him I was here, she thought, and reached out to embrace him; only after did she notice how alarmed he was at her torn clothes and the condition of her face.
“You’ve got blood on you and cuts all over,” he said. “Someone’s got to take a look at you.” Without brooking dissent, he took her hand and led her across the partition to the field hospital, shouting for a doctor.
The nearest doctor came running and examined Diane right where she was; peering into her eyes, palpating, moving her limbs, taking her blood and loading it into a portable nanny reader. “Nothing broken or torn,” she said after a moment. “Some internal bleeding, but the nannies are taking care of it, and they’re not reporting any organ damage. You’ve got a minor concussion and you’ll look like a Chandrasekhar painting for a few days, but nothing lasting.”
That was what Diane had figured, but it was good news all the same.
“Even so, I think you’re done for the night,” the doctor said. “No sense taking any chances.” Diane protested briefly for honor’s sake, but her heart wasn’t in it and the doctor could tell. Her fingers flickered above a datacloth, opening Diane’s callup file and marking it “MEDICAL RELEASE.” “I’ll call a cop to take you home. And you” – she turned to Roger – “are going with your mother. You’re released too.”
It was a measure of Roger’s concern that he didn’t protest at all.
#
“You look like you’ve been through a war,” said the cop outside. He looked like he’d been through one himself, and he looked inordinately grateful to just be driving someone home.
Neither of them, or even Roger, had much to say during the ride; down Ninth, over the bridge, and into the canal at Ennis. The police car’s wheels retracted when it entered the canal and it skimmed the water the rest of the way to Diane’s house. Here, in a place sheltered from the storm, the water seemed unnaturally calm, and the cop easily kept the car steady as she got out and onto the sidewalk.
Home. A door, a light, someplace warm and dry where she could stay. And a shower that was far too long delayed.
“Should I make dinner, Mom?” Roger asked as Diane headed upstairs.
“Have you eaten?”
“They gave us food at the hospital.”
“Then don’t worry – I’m not really hungry. But make a hot chocolate, with caramel. And remember to make two.” Roger was a good kid, but sometimes he cared so much he forgot to take care of himself.
She waited for his acknowledgment and went the rest of the way upstairs to the shower that was just off her bedroom. She ran the hot water and began lifting her shirt over her head; she wondered what was so heavy in the pockets, and then remembered the two pieces of rubble she’d taken from the maintenance tunnel. She let the shirt fall back and held them in her hands, the cement in one and the rebar in the other, weighing them, imagining how she might shape them.
Storm jewels, she thought. Tomorrow she would touch them with the pathfinder, and they would branch in a million million directions.
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It's good to see it brought up here, though--should be brought up more often. How many timelines cast environmental issues almost entirely by the wayside, despite taking place in times when they were and are of profound importance? Usually it seems like the only thing that gets attention is global warming, and even then only due to the disruption it can cause states.
But can I tell a story?
I've mentioned before that if a citizen of the Malêverse in 2100 were asked what government was for - the kind of question that a 16th-century person might answer "roads and ports" or a 20th-century person "defense and economic development" - their answer would most likely be "environmental management." By that time, maintaining the environment is the greatest sustained challenge remaining to human society, and one in which global coordination and scale are not merely convenient but necessary.
Update: the current installment and the previous one has been added to the Malê Rising installments page.
Thank you!
Maybe not quite what @Kaiphranos had in mind, but it occurs to me that the difference between utopia and dystopia is sometimes in the shading. I could have made Pathfinder a dystopian story with very few edits - it's already got rising sea levels, terrorism, and conscription, and with a few brush strokes (and maybe this as the graphic), I could have suggested that these things were happening in an unequal society where the burden of disaster is borne by the lower class, Diane and her son are expendable workers being thrown into the meatgrinder, and the attack and rescue are both aimed at Manhattan because the outer boroughs have already been left at the mercy of the storm. But instead, with other brush strokes in the same places, I showed that the story was taking place in a society verging on post-scarcity which has put a lot of resources into mitigating climate change for everyone, and where, with a quarter-millennium of Malêverse history as background, the emergency conscription has its roots in an ethic of solidarity and mutual aid. Same events, different backdrop, and that can make all the difference in the world.
In something that I learned today that is pertinent (and resonant) to the recent updates, Greenland now has its own rainforest growing in a valley with (according to Wikipedia) over 300 plant species multiplying in a single fjord that has seen enough precipitation, sunlight, and relative warmth for actual trees to grow. Besides that, there are now actual tree planting organizations with aims to grow forests over southern Greenland in recognition of climate change.
Not only to these new developments raise the question of introduced species and tundra/forest/ice sheet management, it also highlights the broader role climate change is affecting the world that would feel very topical to the Malêverse: should the geological, climatological, and ecological clock be turned back? Or should humanity go with the flow and make the best of a changed world?
Not only to these new developments raise the question of introduced species and tundra/forest/ice sheet management, it also highlights the broader role climate change is affecting the world that would feel very topical to the Malêverse: should the geological, climatological, and ecological clock be turned back? Or should humanity go with the flow and make the best of a changed world?
To be fair, Wikipedia also points out that this forest well predates significant climate change (it's been legally protected since 1930, and there's a photo from 1900), and may represent the last survivor of other forests that were cleared by human action during the Norse period. So it doesn't precisely represent the effects of climate change on Greenland.
Before reading this I had no idea some of the forests in Norway and Canada are called temperate rainforests, but is Qinngua Valley really included in this too?
As far as I can see the links doesn’t describe it as a rainforest.
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I went down some rabbit holes and it seems that southern Greenland does receive enough precipitation that, at least, would place Qinngua Valley as potentially viable as a temperate rainforest. For the moment though, the area is more forest than anything else, probably due to being so close to the ice sheet and so isolated that no great variety of plant/fauna species has formed or migrated.
However, with the tree plantings going-on, who knows if there shall be more species introduced to Qinngua Valley, either through accidental dispersion or intentional placement.
Apologies for horrifically belated response, but Suleiman and eliphas were talking about the Riviera case, right?
Given the date, I'm pretty sure they were talking about the Derrick Hamilton case. There's an article here that discusses the case, and other cases involving the same disgraced detective, in more depth, and is the only time to date that my name has been mentioned in GQ. Hamilton was formally exonerated about a year later, in January 2015.
On a completely different topic, someone pointed me today to a review of Malê Rising on the Sea Lion Press forum, written by Gary Oswald. It's an insightful review, both admiring and critical. The criticism is fair [1] - this timeline was overambitious, and some of the points Mr. Oswald makes about unintentional values dissonance have come up for discussion here as well - and he makes an accurate distinction, which I'm not sure I was really conscious of at the time, between the "scenes I actually wanted to write" and those I wrote from a sense of duty to the scope of the timeline. Most of those scenes were narrative stories, and I don't think it's a coincidence that my post-conclusion updates to the timeline have all been narrative stories.
It's a useful counterpoint to what I've tried to do here. And at a time when I don't have many stories to tell - the last five years have succeeded in leaching that out of me for the present, and it sometimes feels like missing a limb - it's very gratifying that in 2021, people are still talking about this story, criticizing it, and being ambiguously inspired by it.
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[1] Which isn't the same as saying I agree with all of it. Some of the points made in criticism are worldview-dependent. But as Mr. Oswald correctly points out, so is this timeline, and my own worldview hasn't remained static.
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I was tagged into this so presumably you're aware that I am Gary Oswald. I am glad that you got something out of my thoughts, Jonathan.
Ultimately, for all the criticism, I do unambiguously love this story and I do admire it very deeply. Just on a personal level, if I hadn't stumbled upon this story, I wouldn't have spent the last 6 years knee deep into both Alternate History and Africa History and my life would be much poorer as a result. It's still the AH timeline I am most fond of.
I stand by my criticisms but I wouldn't want that to overshadow the genuine admiration I have for this work and you as a writer.
And it saddens me to think you have no stories to tell at the moment, when you're such a great storyteller. I hope that too shall pass.
Ultimately, for all the criticism, I do unambiguously love this story and I do admire it very deeply. Just on a personal level, if I hadn't stumbled upon this story, I wouldn't have spent the last 6 years knee deep into both Alternate History and Africa History and my life would be much poorer as a result. It's still the AH timeline I am most fond of.
I stand by my criticisms but I wouldn't want that to overshadow the genuine admiration I have for this work and you as a writer.
And it saddens me to think you have no stories to tell at the moment, when you're such a great storyteller. I hope that too shall pass.