Monster Planet(46)

The Mayor shrugged. 'It's been years, he said. Let him have a taste. In the morning he'll feel like shit and he'll curse God and then he'll go back to normal. It's not like we make enough liquor for him to become an alcoholic.' She frowned. 'After the things we've seen, all of us, I think we deserve to get polluted now and again. I wouldn't mind getting a snoot full myself, actually. To you,' she said, and pointed at the blighted wheat on the table, 'that might look pretty banal. To me it's a reminder. The first couple of winters here were... hard. There were two hundred of us, originally. Now, even with the refugees we've adopted and a couple of births we're down to seventy-nine.'

Sarah didn't know what to make of that. It sounded bad, it was true, but like nothing compared to what had become of Africa. There had been a whole nation of survivors there once. It wasn't around any more.

'I know you saw the slacks in the garden. I know what you must think of us. But we couldn't have made it without help.' Marisol smiled and reached forward with one tentative hand. When Sarah didn't flinch Marisol cupped the younger woman's chin and smiled at her. 'You know some of the stories, of course. You know about Gary.'

Sarah nodded. No more needed to be said. What Gary had done to Marisol, and how eventually he was destroyed, was part of the myth of Governors Island. It was part of the myth of the Epidemic.

'There are things I have to tell you, hard things. It's too bad I'm such a spineless coward. So instead I'm just going to show you and you'll have to cope whatever way you know how. You can hate me later, I'm okay with that.'

Sarah's heart sank. She had something to learn'something which would make her cry. Jack had told her as much, in his usual, cryptic way. This was going to be it, she was sure of it. She didn't speak or protest in any way, though, as Marisol took her hand and lead her back out into the darkness. The Mayor paused only to speak to her son, to little Jackie, and tell him to stay put with Osman and wait for her to return.

'When I saw you I hated you a little,' Marisol said. 'It's not fair that Dekalb gets to have such a healthy and beautiful daughter. My little boy is what we used to call sickly.' She grunted a little in pain, but not the physical kind. 'He's got genetic problems, a heart murmur, the early signs of scoliosis and maybe even Lupus. Do you know about those? We can barely diagnose them'there's no treatment at all, not anymore.'

'Is he going to be okay?' Sarah asked, scared for the kid. Most sickly children in Africa died in their first couple of years.

'I won't let him slip away from me, not when he's all I have left of... of some old friends.' Marisol grew quiet then, very quiet. She lead Sarah along the edge of the water, along a concrete parapet lined with a steel railing that had fallen away in places. When she saw where they were headed Sarah felt her heart speeding up.

Marisol had lead her along a narrow causeway to the octagonal ventilation tower at the northern tip of the island. It rose over them in the dark like a giant robot out of science fiction, a clattering, enormous construction of fans that turned endlessly and vents that flicked open and shut in a pattern of willful randomness. A skeletal crown of exposed girders topped it, the stars showing through rusted gaps in the metal.

They threaded a simple maze of empty cargo containers and came to a set of three metal stairs leading to the tower's doorway. 'This place was nothing special, back in the day,' Marisol told Sarah. 'It's just a vent, a pipe stuck in the ground to provide air for the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel.'

'There's a tunnel under the bay?' Sarah asked. As usual the marvels of twentieth-century engineering fascinated her, even if her elders found them trivial and commonplace. 'How did they build it without all the water getting in?'

Marisol shook her head. She didn't know, or didn't care to answer. She took an enormous keyring from her belt and unlocked the tower's door. Then she stepped aside. Clearly Sarah was supposed to go in alone.

A little light illuminated the tower's guts, a wan little electric light that came from hundreds of weak bulbs, some mounted in cages on the walls, some dangling on wires draped across the vast open space. Sarah found herself on a gallery, a narrow enclosed walkway that ran around the edge of an open pit. She looked down and saw that the vast majority of the tower was just an empty shaft, an air shaft with one enormous fan at its bottom. Its vanes rotated with geological slowness but still it generated a vast wind that rushed up into her face and pushed the hood of her sweatshirt back. She imagined a generator must be hooked up to that fan to power all the lights.