she heard herself saying. “It’s a good solid system.”
“A solid system? Perhaps you forget you’re discussing a liquid.”
Lila shifted in her seat. I hate this man, she thought.
“We’ve done studies,” Lansing said. “We think you could easily give up the northern aquifer.”
“No.”
Lansing Pettigrew smiled. “Let me use your keyboard a moment.” He reached across her desk and tapped in a code so quickly Lila wasn’t sure if it was numbers or letters. “There,” he said. “Drag up Wonderwater.” Lila opened the file.
“You see you’re losing population,” Lansing said, nodding at a graph on the screen, “and there’s no reason to assume the trend won’t continue. Dayton’s not a lure these days. And you already have a very water-conscious populace. Your legacy.” He smiled more broadly. “So holding on to all your water is optional.” His eyes met hers. “You could even say it’s selfish.”
Don’t be selfish Don’t make our city pay Shower for ninety seconds Every other day!
A jingle from Lila’s “We Save Wawa” glory days, accompanied, during the Web and television spots, by marimbas and guitars. “I don’t know how we got so Latin,” Seymour-the-transvestite-assistant had complained one day, a comment that still made Lila smile.
Old times. Happy times.
Now Lila was forced to defend herself. “I’m not selfish. I’m looking out for my population.”
“You could look out for your country.”
“Why do you need more water for the Grid? I thought you people were swimming in water. You have some kind of water defense plan? You planning to blast planes out of the sky with water cannons?”
Lansing snorted. “I warned Michelle you were a character.”
The night before, while Lila was masturbating thinking about Michelle the youngie, who’d never reappeared in her office, Lila thought her labia seemed smaller. Was that possible? She checked herself in a mirror. It was possible. Her ripest parts were dry and wrinkled, the skin dull and the hairs half gray.
What was a person, traveling through life? What did one person matter? Once Lila had mattered. For the last six months, on her office computer, Lila could get into Watersystems Dayton and Waterhouse and H2O-ville, but Wonderwater was closed to her. It had never been closed before. She wondered what it meant that Lansing Pettigrew had opened the site for her now. Was it a threat? A promise? An invitation?
“I heard some people from Consort got invited to the Grid,” Lila said. “If you want my water, why don’t you let me visit there? Don’t I get to see how my water would be used?” Idle curiosity, she’d think later, was all that had fueled this request. Everyone wanted to visit the Grid. Everyone wanted to tell people they’d been there.
“Lila, Lila. It’s not easy to get permission to visit the Grid. Even I couldn’t get in there.”
Things were happening, she realized. Water was changing, and she was being purposely left out. Years before, after the Gridding, Lila had quit her Water Queen job. At the time, she felt ashamed to be in government, and guilty and confused that the Gridding had happened at all. Her quitting generated wrath and tearful, earnest moments in the Water Department, as if her leaving was a death. A year later she had calmed down, early crops from the Grid were being distributed, and Lila asked to be hired back. She was, but it wasn’t the same. People who had stayed in the Water Department didn’t know what to think of her; they couldn’t trust her; they had learned they didn’t need her. Power, Lila realized then, wasn’t just a matter of position. Power was a matter of seizing it. Now Lila wondered, almost idly, if she had the energy to grab at power again.
“I was an Official Witness!” Lila said, her voice ringing with righteousness. “I was there at the beginning. Doesn’t all I’ve done count for anything?”
“Lila,” Lansing said, shaking his head.
A week later Lila was in her car driving east on I-70 to Columbus. I-70 ran all the way across the country, from San Francisco to Philadelphia. The media liked to say it “bisected” the Grid, but in reality it divided the Grid into an upper three-fourths and a lower quarter. When the Grid was conceived (this came out later, in the Waye Report), it was expected to lie only north of I-70, sparing such southern towns as New Lebanon and Yellow Springs. But the fertility statistics on the land south of I-70 were compelling, and the long ribbon of Grid land below the highway—a ribbon that stretched from Columbus, Ohio, across Indiana and Illinois all the way to the Mississippi River, interrupted only by the cities of Dayton and Indianapolis—was known as the AUL, an acronym for Area Under the Line, the phrase itself a joke, because among the engineers who planned the Grid was a cadre of mathematicians who remembered with fondness “Area Under the Curve” (AUC) from their calculus days.
The highway was four lanes in each direction and heavily traveled. There were sections of road further east with magnets embedded in the asphalt to control traffic flow, but on this section of road a vehicle had the freedom to pass. America was much less mobile these days than during Lila’s childhood, when her family’s thoughtless drives to Montana and Colorado bespoke a reckless freedom. Amazing that people had lived for years with no sense of the world’s limitations. All they’d cared about was the price of gas.
The Grid was hidden from the highway on either side by a high partition made of recycled tires and polymers and decorated with painted murals of agricultural themes. During the Grid construction the partitions were put up within days of the evacuations, before the towns were leveled. Guard towers topped the walls every five miles or so, and between the towers the wall was topped with electric fencing and surveillance equipment. No one got onto the Grid without permission. Everyone knew people who knew people who had a friend who’d tried to sneak onto the Grid and been rebuffed, who even—who knew if these stories were true?—had disappeared.
Boring drive. Straight road, flat, and dominated by trucks. The partitions on each side gave Lila the sensation of shooting down a river through a canyon. Lila clicked her car into a maintain-speed mode and bit her lip. If the Feds truly wanted her water, they’d better give her something in return.
“You’re security clearance P-3,” the youngie-girl in Columbus said. Lila wondered why she wasn’t higher. “Lucky I’m in a good mood,” the youngie said.
IT STARTED INNOCENTLY, because Chad had an eye for errors. He was sitting in his bedroom chair reading on his holo-screen an article about Sharis, “the first gigastar,” and her “almost twenty-five years in show business, starting with her big break in 2023 playing Keela Ward in Dakota Blues.”
“Dakota Blues didn’t really come out in ’23, did it?” Chad asked his wife.
“Wait a minute, Chad. Let me finish this.”
Chad’s Sharis was at her editon at a desk in the corner, trying to fit in the Schneiders before dinner. Sharis was a life-editor: she went through hours of footage and found for a family the few minutes a week they would want to view over and over. She had fallen into her work, really. She had artistically compiled footage of a neighbor’s wedding; people liked it and passed it around, and then a family living in Louisville asked if she’d edit scenes of them at home. After that the whole thing just took off. Sharis was hardly the only life-editor around, but she thought she had a special touch.
