Ark Read Free Page B

around Alice Springs, Australia, as the residents resisted attempts by the federal government to relocate refugees from flooded-out Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.
    Holle played before the TV, investigating the toys. She seemed immune to the bombardment of horrors on the news, just as the world’s various disasters had seemed unreal to Patrick when he was a kid in the long-lost twentieth century. Best not to hide stuff from her, he had decided. Holle’s life was liable to be shaped by bad news. He liked to think Linda would have backed up this intuition, but he was never going to know.
    That evening he took Holle down to dinner in one of the hotel’s fancy restaurants. The waiters made a fuss of her as they elegantly served her a kiddie version of paella. It was a special request from Patrick, a kind of comfort food, a dish her mother used to make for her. Afterward, back in the suite, he played card games with her, and let her watch a couple of episodes of Friends on TV, and read to her until she slept.
    Then he opened up his laptop and checked his e-mails.
    The big construction projects up on the Great Plains were proceeding well, although disgruntled refugees being settled there bitterly called them “Friedmanburgs.” He referred that to his PR department for guidance.
    Patrick was also involved in the furiously paced open-cast mining of the Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta. Oil, coal, gas and oil shale were already being intensively mined in Colorado, all over the Western Slope. The Alberta grab was on a different scale. It was supposedly sanctioned by the relocated Canadian government in Edmonton, but that was a fig-leaf fiction. The US federal government in Denver intended to extract as many of the hundreds of billions of barrels of oil available from the bitumen as possible before the seas closed over it all, in not many years from now if the gloomier experts were right. The government’s purpose was to secure its own position in the short term, and have a basis for national recovery in the longed-for day when the flood started to recede. The damage already done to the ecology and environment and so forth was ruinous. But rich men in the right place, like Patrick Groundwater, were getting even richer. Patrick had never imagined he would find himself in such a role. But somebody had to do it, and he tried to fulfill what he saw as his responsibilities conscientiously. Such was the way of the world.
    A gentle snoring told him Holle was sleeping deeply. He checked on her, covering her with her blanket a little more tightly, and made sure her Angel was switched off.
    Then he went back to work.
     
     
     
    In the morning Holle woke him up at six a.m., as usual. To his huge relief it wasn’t raining, and the summer sun was trying to break through towering clouds. By eight they had finished their room-service breakfast.
    Despite Alice Sylvan’s protestations, he decided they were going to walk and see the sights; they had a couple of hours to spare before he was due to meet Nathan Lammockson at the city’s public library. Holle had spent most of her young life in gated communities. It would be enriching for her to see something resembling a functioning city. So he packed a bag with child-type essentials, tissues, a book, a couple of toys, Holle’s Angel, a water bottle. Holle wore a summer dress, and with sunblock on her arms and face and a pink hat on her head they were ready to go.
    They set off with Alice’s team scattered around them, pushing through the early morning crowds down Tremont Place toward the 16th Street Mall. The buildings were marred by cracked glass panes and peeling paint, the green spaces given over to crops like potatoes and beans, and the trees had long ago been cut down for firewood. Few cars moved on the wide avenues—you saw tanks or armored vehicles more than cars—but the roads were full of pedestrians and cycles and rickshaws, pushing past long-disconnected traffic