Welcome to the Greenhouse (14 page)

“You express your remorse now,” remarked the Godfather. “At the time, you were taking great pride in your superb ability to compose a sentence.”

“I admit my misdeeds, sir. I am contrite.”

“More recently, you and your friends were plotting against Our election,” said the Godfather patiently. “As a further patent insult to Our dignity, you had yourself crowned as the ‘President of the United States.’ There are witnesses to that event.”

“That was a diversion,” said Julian. “That was part of a magic ceremony. To help me electrically reach the virtual image of the planet Venus.”

“Juli, have you become a heretic, or just a maniac? You should read the allegations in these confessions! They are fantastic. Your fellow conspirators say that you believe that men can still fly. That you conjured living phantoms in public. We don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“People talk,” said Julian. “In a cage, people will sing.” “You dressed your slave as a golden goddess and you made people worship her.”

“That was her costume,” said Julian. “She enjoyed that. I think it was the only time I’ve ever seen her happy.”

“Juli, We are not your classmate any more. We have become your Godfather. It is unclear to Us what you thought you were gaining by this charade. In any case, that will go on no longer. Your cabal has been arrested. Your house, and all that eerie rubbish inside it, has been seized. In times this dark and troubled, We have no need for epicene displays. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now tell Us what We are supposed to do with you.”

“Let me go,” said Julian, sweating in the stony chill. “Release me, and I will sing your praises. Some day history will speak of you. You will want history to say something noble and decent about you.”

“That is a tempting offer,” mused the Godfather. “I would like history to say this of me: that I was an iron disciplinarian who scourged corruption, and struck his enemies with hammer blows. Can you arrange that?”

“I can teach rhetoric. Someone will say that for you, and they’ll need great skill.”

“I hate a subtle insult,” said the Godfather. “I can forgive an enemy soldier who flings a spear straight at me, but a thing like that is just vile.”

“I don’t want to die here in this stone cage!” screeched Julian. “I can write a much better groveling confession than these other wretches! A man of your insight knows that confessions are nothing but rhetoric! Of course they all chose to indict me! How could they not? They are men with families to consider, while I am foreign-born and I have no one! We’re all intelligent men! We all know that if someone must die, then I’m the best to die. I’m one against four! But surely you must know better!”

“Of course I know better,” said the Godfather. “You imagined that, as men of letters, you were free of the healthy atmosphere of general fear so fit for everyone else. That is not true. Men of letters have to obey Us, they have to serve Us loyally, and they have to know that their lives are forfeit. Just like everyone else.”

“’Uneasy lies the head that wears the hood,’” said Julian.

“You always had a fertile mind for an apposite quote. We are inclined to spare you.”

Light bloomed in the dampest corner of Julian’s mind. “Yes, of course, of course I should be spared! Why should I die? I never raised my hand against you. I never even raised my voice.”

“Like the others, you must write your full and complete confession. It will be read aloud to the assembled court. Then, a year in the field with the army will toughen you up. You’re much too timid to fight, but Our army needs its political observers. We need clearly written reports from the field. And the better my officers, the worse they seem to write!”

“Is there a war? Who has attacked us?”

“There is no war just as yet,” said the Godfather. “But of course they will attack Us, unless We prove to them that they dare not attack. So, we plan a small campaign to commence Our reign. One insolent village, leveled. You’ll be in no great danger.”

“I’m not a coward.”

“Yes, in fact, you are a coward, Julian. You happened to live in a time when you could play-act otherwise. Those decadent times have passed. You’re a coward, and you always were. So, make a clean breast of your many failings. We pledge that you too will be spared. You might as well write your own confessions, for your sins are many and you know them better than anyone.”

“Once I do that for you, you’ll spare my friends.”

“We will. We don’t say they will suck the blood of the taxpayer anymore, but yes, they will be spared.”

“You’ll spare my students.”

“Fine young men. They were led astray. Young men of good family are natural officer material.”

“You’ll give me back my house and my servant.”

“Oh, you won’t need any house, and as for your wicked witch… You should read the thunderation that rings around her little head! Your friends denounced you—but in their wisdom, they denounced her much, much more violently. They all tell Us that this lamentable situation is not your fault at all. They proclaim that she seduced you to it, that she turned your head. She drove you mad, she drugged you. She used all the wicked wiles of a foreign courtesan. She descended to female depths of evil that no mere man can plumb.”

Julian sat on his stony bench for a moment. Then he rose again and put his hands around the bars. “Permit me to beg for her life.”

“To spare her is not possible. We can’t publish these many eloquent confessions without having her drowned in the Cistern right away. It would be madness to let a malignant creature like that walk in daylight for even an hour.”

“She did nothing except what I trained her to do! She’s completely harmless and timid. She’s the meekest creature alive. You are sacrificing an innocent for political expediency. It’s a shame.”

“Should We spare this meek creature and execute you, and four friends? She was a lost whore, and the lowest of the low, as soon as her own soldiers failed to protect her from the world. You want to blame someone for the cold facts? Blame yourself, professor. Let this be a good lesson to you.”

“You are breaking a bird on an anvil here. That’s easy for you to do, but it’s a cruelty. You’ll be remembered for that. It will weigh on your conscience.”

“It will not,” said the Godfather. “Because We will kindly offer to spare the witch’s life. Then We will watch your friends in a yapping frenzy to have her killed. Your noble scholars will do everything they can to have her vilified, lynched, dumped into the Cistern, and forgotten forever. They will blame her lavishly in order to absolve themselves. Then, when you meet each other again, you men with a cause, you literati—that’s when the conscience will sting.”

“So,” said Julian, “it’s not enough that we’re fools, or that we’re cowards, or that we failed to defend ourselves. We also have to be evil.”

“You are evil. Truly, you are fraudulent and wicked men. We should wash you from the fabric of society in a cleansing bath of blood. But We won’t do that. Do you know why? Because We understand necessity. We are responsible. We know what the state requires. We think these things through.”

“You could still spare us. You could forgive us for the things we wrote and thought. You could be courageous and generous. That is within your great power.”

The Godfather sighed. “That is so easy for a meager creature like you to say, and so difficult for Us to do. We will tell you a little parable about that. Soon, this cell door will open. Now: When this door is opened, place your right hand in this doorframe. We will have this husky bodyguard slam this iron door on your fingers. You will never scribble one mischievous word again. If you do that, Julian, that would be ‘courageous and generous.’ That would be the bravest act of your life. We will spare the life of your mystic witch for that noble act.”

Julian said nothing.

“You’re not volunteering to be so courageous and generous? You can marry her: You have Our blessing. We will perform that ceremony Ourselves.”

“You are right. I don’t want her,” said Julian. “I have no further need for her. Let her be strangled in all due haste and thrown down the well. Let the hungry fish nibble her flesh, let her body be turned into soup and poured through the greenhouses. She came to me half-dead, and every day I gave to her was some day she would never have seen! Let me see that sunlight she will never see again. I hate this cage. Let me out of here.”

After his release from darkness, very little happened to Julian that he found of any interest. After two years of service, Julian managed to desert the army of Selder. There had been no chance of that at first, because the army was so eager, bold, and well disciplined.

However, after two years of unalloyed successes, the army suffered a sharp reverse at the walls of Buena Vista. The hardscrabble villagers there were too stubborn, or perhaps too stupid, to be cowed by such a fine army. To the last man, woman, and child, they put up a lethal resistance. So the village was left in ruins, but so was the shining reputation of the Godfather and his troops.

Julian fled that fiery scene by night, losing any pursuers in the vast wild thickets of cactus and casuarina. Soon afterward, he was captured by the peasants of Denver. There was little enough left of that haunted place. However, the Denver peasants sold him to a regional court with a stony stronghold in the heights of Vale.

Julian was able to convince the scowling peers of that realm that they would manage better with tax records and literate official proclamations. That was true: They did improve with a gloss of civility. They never let him leave, but they let him live.

After a course of further indifferent years, word arrived in Vale that the Godfather of Selder had perished in his own turn. He had died of sickness in a war camp, plague and war being much the same thing. There were certain claims that he had been poisoned.

After some further tiresome passage of years, the reviving realm of Selder began to distribute traders, bankers, and ambassadors. They were a newer and younger-spirited people. They were better dressed and brighter-eyed. They wrote everything down. They observed new opportunities in places where nothing had happened for ages. They had grand plans for those places, and the ability to carry them out.

These new men of Selder seemed to revel in being a hundred things at once. Not just poets, but also architects. Not just artists, but also engineers. Not just bankers, but gourmands and art collectors. Even their women were astonishing.

Julian had no desire to return to the damp glassy shadows of Selder. He had come to realize that a Sustainable City that could never forget its past could become an object of terror to simpler people. Also, he had grown white-haired and old.

But he was not allowed to ignore a velvet invitation—a polite command, really—from Godfather Magnanimous Jef the First. Practical Jeffrey had outlasted his city’s woes with the stolid grace that was his trademark. Jef’s shrewd rise to power had cost him a brother and two bodyguards, but once in command, he never set his neatly shod foot wrong.

In his reign, men and women breathed a new air of magnificence, refinement, and vivacity. Troubles that would have crushed a lesser folk were made jest of, simply taken in stride.

Men even claimed that the climate was improving. This was delusional, for nothing would ever make the climate any better. But the climate within the hearts of men was better. Men were clearly and simply a better kind of man.

Julian had never written a book, for he had always said that his students were his books. And with the passage of years, Julian’s students had indeed become his books. They were erudite like books, complex like books, long-lasting like books. His students had become great men. Their generation was accomplishing feats that the ancients themselves had never dreamt of. Air wells, ice-ponds and aqueducts. Glass palaces of colored light. Peak-flashing heliographs and giant projection machines. Carnivals and pageants. Among these men, greatness was common as dirt.

It was required, somehow, that the teacher of such men should himself be a great man. So the great men delighted in honoring Julian. He was housed in a room in one of their palaces, and stuffed with creature comforts like a fattened capon. His only duty was to play the sage for his successors, to cackle wise inanities for them. To sing the praises of the golden present, and make the darkest secrets of a dark age more tenaciously obscure.

Futurity could never allow the past to betray it again.

“The refusal of Amos and Stephanie Byers to accept voluntary buyout for their place of legal residence is hereby entered into the record. Your appeal of my ruling for disallowance will be forwarded to the local Joint Resolution Board for final disposition. By law, that decision must be rendered within ten working days, and is final. No further appeals are allowable, or will be accepted in any court of law.”

Administrative Law Judge Sebastian Carver leaned back from the recorder on his desk, glancing at the clock on the left wall. Amos followed his gaze; they had six minutes remaining of their allotted fifteen. They could spend that time pleading, crying, or threatening suicide, and it wouldn’t really matter. Appealing to the Joint Board was a pro forma excuse for a genuine legal appeal. This was a new process, but so far, throughout the entire country, the Fed-State-County Boards had very rarely overruled a decision by an Interior administrative judge.

Looking past Carver, Amos saw a small banner pasted on the rear wall of this borrowed office, the unofficial motto of those assigned the thankless but necessary task of forcing millions of people to abandon their homes.

SAVE AMERICA!

SAVING THE COMMUNITY AS A WHOLE OUTWEIGHS THE LOSS OF HOMES BY THE FEW Sebastian Carver pulled his worn swivel chair forward, placed both elbows on his desktop pad, and focused his gaze on Stephanie. Watching, Amos realized this perceptive man had understood from the beginning that she was the fragile one here.

“Mrs. Byers, I saw in your petition that you’ve spent almost your entire life in your present home; that you grew up there, and later inherited it from your parents.” Carver had a deep, soft voice, with no noticeable accent. Somehow he managed to sound sincerely sympathetic. “You even gave it a name…” he picked up and scanned the one-page form. “’Merry Weather.’ But your home and three neighbors are on Hurricane Point, which extends out into the Banana River lagoon. According to our engineers, a regular dike won’t protect you. They would have to extend a very high reinforced seawall all the way around the Point, which would cost over three million dollars. The four houses have been evaluated at 1.4 million, minus the land. I’m very sorry, but I don’t think there’s much chance the Joint Resolution Board will authorize such an added expense.”

Instead of answering, Stephanie abruptly got to her feet and walked out the door. Amos hastily followed, nodding at Carver as he exited. The gray-haired judge gave him a sad smile and nodded back.

Amos caught up with Stephanie as she hurried down the long hallway of the district courthouse. He saw tears in her eyes, but her expression was more angry and frustrated than sad. When he tried to take her hand, she turned her head and glared at him.

“I didn’t hear you saying very much in there, Amos!”

Taken aback, he fell in behind Stephanie as she pushed through the door to the parking lot. He had said earlier that this appeal was a waste of time. He had not shared his hope that fighting back would make her feel better. It didn’t seem to have worked.

“Sweetheart, I have to be a little careful in what I say. I work for Interior too now. But at least we can stay on Merritt Island. Think of the poor people in Cocoa Beach, Satellite, Indian Harbor, the rest of the barrier islands. Their whole
communities
are being abandoned!”

“I know, and that doesn’t make me feel any better.” They had reached their electric four-seater, and Stephanie walked around to the passenger side. She had driven on the way here, but was clearly too upset to drive safely now. Amos got behind the wheel and turned on the power.

Stephanie was silent on the way home. Amos had not yet told her about the letter received yesterday at work—a printed letter, delivered by the U.S. Mail—and now decided to wait. It was probably nothing anyway. But unlike most similar threats from cranks, this one had been specifically addressed to him, at his place of work; mailed from the downtown post office in Orlando. Someone within easy driving range had selected him as the face of the enemy, and threatened his life.

In their driveway, at the third of the four homes extending to the east on Hurricane Point, Stephanie asked Amos to stop. She got out and crossed the access road to the seawall on the north side. Amos followed, to find her staring down at the water. “It’s up five inches,” she said, voice low. “Just five inches. It rises that much after a few heavy rains.”

Amos tried to think of something comforting to say, and could not. He also loved their home of the past fourteen years, though not with Stephanie’s passion. An only child, as was Amos, she had inherited Merry Weather when her parents died in a high-speed train crash in 2018. The twin girls they had adopted as babies three years earlier needed more room. Selling their small condo and moving to Merry Weather had been an easy choice, helped by the fact her parents’ mortgage insurance had cleared the house of debt. That also meant Interior would reimburse them for the full value of the house. Displaced homeowners typically received their equity share of the house, minus the value of the condemned land.

They walked back to the car and Amos drove it inside the garage. Stephanie went past him to the unlocked utility room access door. He was getting out of the car when he heard her scream.

Amos ran for the open door and charged inside to find Stephanie standing at the opposite end of the utility room, staring into the kitchen. He hurried to her. With a shaking hand she pointed across the room to the door that opened into the yard on the south side. It stood open.

“There was a man in here! Well, maybe a teenager. He was standing in front of the junction box when I opened the door.”

Amos hurried across the kitchen and out onto the lawn. He was in time to see someone running across the backyard of the first house on the point, the Wilkersons’. The figure vanished around the building. Seconds later he heard the sound of an old gasoline engine starting, and a vehicle driving away.

No point trying to catch him. Amos walked back inside, to find Stephanie in the utility room, staring at the junction box. Its little metal door hung open. He checked, and all switches were on. He closed and latched it, then turned to see Stephanie staring at him.

“That—that was a gutter, wasn’t it? My God! Word gets around

fast!”

Amos reached for his wife and took her in his arms. He held her trim body—only three inches shorter than his five-foot-eleven—to his chest, and gently patted her back. The open junction box was the clue. Gutters were salvage crews who operated in a legal gray area, stripping a house during the interval between the time the owner moved out and the demolition crew arrived. They would pull out the junction box itself, the copper wires from the walls, the bathroom and kitchen fixtures, the big AC unit in the yard—anything of value that could be resold. They justified their actions under the rationale that the house was going to be demolished anyway. The authorities were not willing to crack down on them, or get into the reclamation business themselves; not enough money recovered to justify the time and manpower.

Stephanie put her arms around his waist and began crying. Amos let her sob, face against his neck, her short, curly chestnut hair tickling his ear. The teenage appraiser for some local gutter crew—they were springing up everywhere along the coastlines—had forced her to see their home as it would be when they finished; a roof over a concrete block shell, a skeleton with the body gone. Everything that made the house a comfortable home, with lovely views north and south along the Banana River lagoon—gone. Merry Weather had been at the upper limit in price for a middle-class working couple like Stephanie’s parents. They had sacrificed many of life’s other pleasures to afford this place. And the same twist of fate that had cost them their planned retirement here had given the house to Stephanie, free and clear.

When her sobbing eased, Amos led Stephanie into the kitchen and seated her at the breakfast table. A large picture window in the wall looked south over the water, to the causeway and bridge connecting Merritt Island with Cocoa Beach. He could see Cape Canaveral Hospital, on its man-made island abutting the Highway 520 causeway, and beyond that the tops of the tallest buildings in Cocoa Beach. The launch facilities on Cape Canaveral to the north, built at a cost of billions of dollars, had been adjudged worth saving. So was most of Merritt Island, including the main part west of Hurricane Point. A case of lucky location would save the city of Cape Canaveral, just below the Cape itself, but half of Cocoa Beach to its south would be lost. Private homes and giant condominiums, office towers and supermarkets, all would be torn down, the concrete block walls and pillars salvaged and cut up into manageable pieces, becoming part of the riprap covering the sloping surfaces of twenty-foot-high dikes. Climatologists had firmly stated that the maximum possible rise in sea level would be thirteen feet. Congress had decreed that all dikes must protect for twenty.

Amos had earned a degree in mechanical engineering, then specialized in hydraulics. He hadn’t said so aloud to Stephanie, but he agreed with the dike route planners. Hurricane Point was simply too expensive to save. So were the homes near the ends of the two long, narrow southern extensions of Merritt Island. The dike would run from about three miles below the Highway 520 Causeway and bridge, across Sykes Creek and the shallow Indian River lagoon, to the mainland. All homesites east and south of that line would be lost to the rising Atlantic.

And that was just the local area, admittedly one of the most vulnerable in Florida. All the islands off the west coast—Sanibel, Long Boat Key, Santa Rosa—had been condemned, their inhabitants among the first to be told they must move. The Florida Keys were being sacrificed in their entirety. There were no winners here, only some losing less than others. The largest civil works and relocation project in history was well under way, and would last for forty years.

Amos felt the warm air as the front door opened and Jada and Janine hurried across the living room and into the kitchen. The fraternal twins, now seventeen, had grown into pretty, brown-skinned young women. Stephanie had wanted to adopt, not bring more children into a crowded world. They had found the twin babies in an orphanage in Guatemala. Now they were juniors, with only a week to go before the end of the school year.

Jada seated herself opposite her parents while Janine opened the refrigerator and got out their afternoon maintenance snacks. “Dad, Mom—how did the appeal go?”

“Your father was right,” said Stephanie. She seemed to be holding herself under tight control. “It was basically a waste of time.”

“So now what?” asked Janine, seating herself in the vacant chair and handing Jada a diet power drink.

“Our appeal will be denied within ten days,” said Amos. “Interior will credit our account with the appraised equity value, house minus land, within sixty days. And we have sixty days after the money arrives to move out.”

“We’ll try to find an apartment in your school district,” said Stephanie. The girls had hated the idea of changing schools for their senior year.

The girls left for their rooms. “Are you going to work tomorrow?” asked Amos.

Stephanie nodded. “I want to keep busy.”

“Me too, then.” It was Thursday, and Amos had asked for two days off. But it was too early to start packing, and he wanted to save what little leave he had. Last year he had left his job as a facilities engineer for Boeing at the Launch Pad 17 complex and joined the Holland Corps, the new Interior Department group formed to dam the nation’s rivers. The Corps of Engineers had the largest single job, building the dikes, but even that storied old organization had been transferred from the U.S. Army to Interior.

In bed later that night Stephanie became unusually demanding, reaching for Amos as soon as he joined her after a late shower. She made love to him with an intensity that left him breathing heavily, and ready for sleep. But Stephanie cuddled close and kept him awake, their foreheads almost touching on the firm pillow, her body shaking with muffled sobs. He held her, petting and soothing, until she finally drifted off into a troubled sleep.

Early next morning Amos drove their hybrid the twelve miles to his new office in the old Kennedy Space Center complex. Stephanie kept the electric for the much longer drive to the Florida Tech campus in Melbourne. She had been teaching at the College of Marine Sciences for the past nine years. The sea turtle nesting season began in May, and the local beaches had been heavily used by loggerheads for centuries. Stephanie had told Amos that she and her three marine biology summer classes were working on a coordinated effort to tag and rope off each new nest in the county. The rubbery, ping-pong-ball-size eggs would later be removed and transferred, under carefully controlled conditions, to higher beaches throughout Florida; one of a million such efforts to preserve threatened sea life.

Amos parked in the large lot behind what had been the huge Kennedy Space Center Headquarters, a six-wing office building, lightly occupied since the demise of the Manned Space Flight Program. Interior had recently claimed the building and it now served as regional headquarters. They had also taken over most of the other KSC office and support buildings. All launches were now from the pads on Cape Canaveral.

In his shared office Amos said hello to the group coordinator at her central desk, got a cup of coffee, and settled in at his cubicle. His group of three engineers had been assigned the task of designing and installing the pumps that would lift the largely fresh water of Sykes Creek, the island’s primary south-flowing drainage system, over the southern dike. The pumps not only had to be reliable beyond the possibility of failure, they had to be supported by independent backup power systems of equal reliability.

But this work wouldn’t save Merry Weather, his own home. Before Amos had finished his first cup of coffee, he was again thinking of Stephanie and her heartbreak over the coming loss. And this was not something they could put off. In many ways Interior had become horribly efficient, especially for a government agency growing in size and responsibility each month. The seizure and demolition of condemned buildings was moving rapidly ahead. The first dikes were going up in Florida and California. Buildings were coming down along the Manhattan shoreline, while the owners complained bitterly about inadequate compensation. A withhold-your-taxes movement was growing, led by people living safely away from the coasts. In short, the federal government was for once acting decisively, and the country was in turmoil.