• HYDROSPHERE
Claire Eng slogged through a pond of mucky water, hauling one end of a nylon net, concentrating hard to keep her footing on the plastic pool liner. She couldn’t afford to make one wrong move in this slimy soup. Not if I don’t want to spend two hours washing gunk out of my hair, she thought. Just beyond the net and its row of floating buoys, a throng of panicky fish protested being herded into this corner of the pond. Their splashing sent ripples lapping too close to the tops of her waders. The fish — and the odorous green gunk they lived in — were ready for harvest. Unfortunately, both smelled awfully ripe, too.
Claire spat greasy, rank droplets. “Come on, Tony!” she complained to the dark-haired boy at the other end of the net. “I still have homework to do, and Daisy’s sure to be a gor-suck pain about chores.”
Tony finished tying his end to a stainless steel grommet and hauled himself out of the pond. On the concrete bank, under a row of potted, overhanging mulberry trees, he used a hose to rinse off his waders before shucking them. “Be right with you, Claire,” he called cheerfully. “Just hold tight another minute!”
Claire tried to be patient, but her hat and sunglasses had come askew while helping drive hordes of hapless fish toward their doom. Now she had to face the relentless Louisiana sun unprotected. The afternoon was muggy, fly smitten, and she almost wished she’d had an excuse not to help her friend harvest this month’s tilapia crop. But, of course, she couldn’t let Tony down. Not with the Mexican megafarms cutting prices these days, driving small-time fish ranchers to the edge.
Angling her head away from the glare, she looked out across the endless flat expanse of Iberville Parish, dotted with cedar groves, rice paddies, and square dark patches of gene-designed quick-cane. And countless fish ponds — chains of low watery ovals, mulberry rimmed and glistening — the cool, efficient protein factories that let chefs in Baton Rouge and New Orleans maintain a spicy culinary tradition long after the Gulf coast fisheries had gone away.
In the distance, she made out a straight, tree-lined hummock, stretching north to south — the East Atchafalaya Basin Protection Levee, one of so many mammoth earthworks thrown up by the Army Corps of Engineers over more than a century, to forever stave off the meeting of two great waters. Endless miles of dikes and channels and monumental spillways lined the Mississippi River, the Gulf, and nearly every flow path conceived in the corp’s computerized contingency plans. Tagging along with her father, and later in her own right, Claire had walked nearly every meter of the vast project. From Logan she had inherited a fascination for hydraulic engineering and an abiding contempt for the sort of techno-arrogance that spoke words like “forever.”
“Idiots,” she muttered. Now the corps was offering Congress a new plan, one “guaranteed” to keep the Mississippi from doing what it was absolutely bound to do eventually — shift its banks and find a new way to the sea. Logan’s private estimates suggested the new levees would keep Old Man River out of the Atchafalaya Valley for another three decades, maximum. Claire considered her father an optimist. “Ten more years, tops,” she said in a low voice.
She’d miss this land when it all disappeared… its criss-crossing little bayous and streams. The dead-still, humid air, thick with tangy Cajun cooking that bit right back when you put it in your mouth. And the old grempers and gremmers, sitting on benches, telling lies about days when there were still patches of mangrove swamp in these parts, thick with deer and ’gators and even “critters” never catalogued by science.
Claire narrowed her eyes and briefly saw the same flat parish roiling under hectare after kilohectare of foamy brown water, a mighty river hauling a continent’s silt down this shortcut to the sea — along with every farm and house and living soul in its path.
But Daisy won’t move. Hell, nobody listens to me, and I’m tired of being called “Cassandra” by all my friends.
In a matter of months she’d be gone from here anyway. Maybe people would pay better attention after she won a reputation elsewhere. After making a name for herself…
“Here, hand me the end.”
She gave a start as Tony tapped her shoulder from the concrete bank. Straining, she dragged the line nearer. It took both of them, hauling together, to pull it taut and tie it off.
“Thanks, Claire,” Tony said. “Here, let me help you out.”
To her astonishment, he didn’t wait for her to slosh over to the ladder. Tony grabbed her shoulder straps and hauled her onto the apron by strength alone. Dripping, she sat there while he hosed off her waders, grinning.
Showoff, she thought. Still, she couldn’t help being impressed. At seventeen Tony was in full growth, changing every day and proud of it. She remembered when he had first surged past her in height, only a short time ago, and she had felt a passing, irrational wave of envy toward her childhood friend. Even in a world leveled for women by technology, there were times when sheer size and power still had their advantages.
Testosterone has its drawbacks, too, Claire reminded herself as she hung the rubber overalls to dry. Her remote-school in Oregon included a curriculum about the many reasons why women could count their blessings that they weren’t male, after all. Still, lately she’d been surprised to catch Tony gazing at her with looks of bashful admiration. Surprising, that is, till she realized.
Oh. It’s sex.
Or something nicer, actually, but closely related. Anyway, whatever it was, Claire wasn’t ready to deal with it right now. Since puberty she had avoided girls her own age, because of their precocious, single-minded, one-topic focus. At fourteen and fifteen, boys seemed more interested in doing things — in projects on the World Net or neat stuff in the real world. Now though, inevitably, her male friends were catching up and starting to go goofy too.
“I’ve got to stay for the harvester truck,” Tony told her, looking down. “Want to wait with me? We could head over to White Castle, after. Maybe join Judy and Paul…”
Judy and Paul were a long-standing couple. To hang out with them in public would make a statement, turning Claire and Tony into “Tony-and-Claire.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to become half of such a four-legged creature, quite yet. Far safer the amorphous throngs of teenagers who gathered at the dry-skating rink, or the Holo-Sim Club…
“I’m sorry, Tony. I really have to go. Daisy—”
“Yeah, I know.” He cut her off quickly, making a show of nonchalance. “You gotta deal with Daisy, poor kid. Well, good luck. Let me know if you can get away later.”
She clambered down slippery steps to the duckboard walkway. “Yeah, I’ll buzz. Or maybe tomorrow we’ll go out with the team after your lacrosse game.”
“Yeah.” He brightened, shouting after her. “Just watch. We’ll turn those guys into holey swiss cheese, full of rads and rems!”
Claire waved one last time and then turned to hurry home under the shadow of towering canebrakes, across tiny bridges where retirees idled with fishing poles, smiling at her with lazy familiarity, and finally past the long-abandoned refinery, now stripped of everything but crumbling, worthless concrete.-
Why does being a teenager make you so impatient? she pondered as she neared Six Oaks, her mother’s tiny autarchy on the bayou. Claire knew she couldn’t put Tony off much longer without hurting him. The profiler at school says I’m just a gradual type. No cause for worry if I’m slower than other kids, or more cautious.
But what if the tests missed something? What if there’s something wrong with me?
Abstractly, Claire knew these were typical thoughts for her age. Every adolescent wonders if he or she’s the vanguard of the latest wave of mutants, made unhuman by some rare, fundamental flaw. Each quirk or idiosyncrasy gets magnified out of all proportion. A zit is the first stage of leprosy. A rebuff means banishment to the Sahara.