Concord, Chapter 6
There will be no lifeboats
The story so far: Sixteen years after escaping the ruined mainland aboard Concord, a self-sustaining floating city, Second Founder Saul Klein lives a quiet life as a teacher, haunted by the loss of his former lover, Suzanne. When desperate refugees arrive by sea, Saul fails to save them but secretly takes possession of a duffel bag containing forbidden relics from the outside world. Meanwhile, Marco Vespucci, Concord’s reclusive First Founder, has been neglecting his troubled daughter, Lila—who confesses to Saul that she is pregnant. With security forces closing in and Concord’s fragile order at stake, Saul must decide whether to finally challenge the world he helped create.
That night he lay between sleep and waking, feeling the subtle movement underneath him, the rise and fall that the residents of Concord had trained themselves not to think about or feel. His eyes drifted closed. The sound of water rushed like blood in his ears. The creak of wood, the smell of damp stone. A trace of perfume. The memory persisted, pure as the sea once had been. In dreams, it always moved.
A year before Concord’s launch they were in Venice, La Serenissima, the original undrowned city. The last year of the old world.
They sat reclining at a little table at the Caffe San Marco looking out at the liquid face of the square, a mirror set to rippling by the legs and feet of the approaching line of protesters. Pants rolled above their knees, signs lifted high, some of them in carnival makeup, chanting in Italian: Non c’è non è un altro Tierra! Non ci saranno scialuppe di salvataggio! One man had a young child on his shoulders, her face painted to look like the Earth, all green and blue; she shook a tambourine excitedly. Three of the protestors maneuvered an elaborate model of the Titanic while a fourth pirouetted with a papier-maché iceberg. He felt the warm pressure of her hand, the cold edge of her wedding ring biting against his knuckle.
“There will be no lifeboats,” Suzanne murmured, translating. “There is no second Earth.”
“I know.” His neuromesh translated all known languages for him, just a beat behind the sound so as to catch the intonation. “But it’s sexier when you say it.” He watched the lines of her mouth twist downward. The procession spiraled awkwardly into the center of the square. “I think the iceberg muddies their message a little, don’t you? The oceans aren’t freezing.”
Suzanne didn’t answer. The little girl’s tambourine spangled over her head, like a second sun.
The café orchestra struck up a waltz to which the marchers lurched and swayed. Her face was framed perfectly by a pair of pendant silver earrings—he’d been with her when she bought them, smiling: I pay for my own gifts. Now her eyes brimmed unexpectedly.
“Saul,” she said. “What are we doing?”
He picked up her left hand and kissed it in reply.
“It’s over,” she said, her eyes on the orchestra.
He held on to her hand, studying the slender fingers with their bitten nails, the platinum ourobouros of her wedding ring, studded with white and blue diamonds. “Are you breaking up with me?”
“That’s not what I meant.” She plucked her hand away and busied herself with her purse. Eyes down, speaking just loudly enough for Saul to hear over the music and the shouting: “He’s here.”
Saul willed himself not to turn in his chair. A hairy hand came smacking down onto his shoulder, forcing a wince.
“There you are!” Marco declared in his accentless English—he seemed to take pride, in his native country, in sounding and appearing as American as possible. He wore shorts, for example, as no self-respecting Italian man would do, and boat shoes, and a red baseball cap with the Concord logo. With his wedge of beard and merry grin he looked a throwback to an earlier age of broligarch, before they’d all put on sober suits and tried to assume the dignity that ought to come with their immense, unelected power. Automatically, Saul glanced around for Marco’s security detail, but it was as invisible as his own. A half-dozen drones drew lazy figure eights over the piazza—a sight so commonplace as to be invisible. One was assigned to him, another to Suzanne. The rest? Marco’s people were always watching.
Marco set down his vintage Leica on the table with a careless bang, and gave Suzanne a little buss on the top of the head before sitting down. “Why didn’t you answer?” he asked, touching his earlobe in the familiar gesture indicating a meshed call.
“She switched off,” Saul said. “She wanted to be in the moment.”
Marco ignored this. “What’s the matter?” he asked her. He handed her a paper napkin and she pressed it wordlessly to her lips. He lifted her chin with his finger and gave her a dry little peck. Saul looked away. “You haven’t been sharing our news?” Marco asked in an admonishing tone.
“Of course not,” she said. “I was waiting for you.”
A mustachioed waiter appeared and Marco gave him instructions in rapid Italian. Saul tried to hold Suzanne’s gaze. When Marco was finished, he turned to him. “What’s your news?”
They were the couple of the century, of the millennium: Marco and Suzanne Vespucci. Only eighteen months ago they’d been mortal enemies: she had been lead attorney in a landmark lawsuit pointed like a dagger at the heart of Concord’s business model. Now she was his wife. And, as the flash of triumph in Marco’s eyes showed, as he put his hand over her belly and gave it a proprietary pat, she would soon be the mother of his child. Saul, who already knew, studied the sun and moon of their faces: Marco’s blazing, Suzanne’s muted and melancholy.
“We’re pregnant!” Marco announced.
“Please,” she muttered. “I’m pregnant.”
“Mazel tov!” Saul said too loudly. “That’s amazing.”
“You did tell him,” Marco accused. “He isn’t surprised.”
“Shocked,” Saul assured him.
Marco studied him while the waiter poured them glasses of Champagne, then let his shark’s grin relax. He turned this softer smile on his wife. “I was starting to think it wouldn’t happen for us,” he said. “Not without medical intervention.”
Suzanne folded Marco’s hand in hers and looked into Saul’s eyes. “Turns out that wasn’t necessary.”
“Cheers,” said Saul, and he stood to hide his blush. They raised their glasses and drank.
The procession in the square had metastasized into a full-sized crowd, a demonstration, incipiently a mob. The usual protesters—young people and aged Communists—had been supplemented by an exuberant assemblage of people of every age and ethnicity, many with toddlers and young children hoisted above the waterline on hips and shoulders, some holding hands, waving signs, chanting. Inevitably a few gondolas had joined the protest—the water was just deep enough. A man in evening dress stood precariously in one of the gondolas with a megaphone in his hand, haranguing the crowd. Saul wondered aloud about the absence of the police.
“They’re there,” Marco assured him in a bland voice. “Plainclothes, infiltrators. You won’t see them, but they’re there.”
Saul glanced up at the swarming drones. “Very reassuring.”
“I bet some of them have joined the march for real,” Suzanne said, gently disengaging from her husband. Marco laughed at her. “What’s so funny?” she flared. “Why shouldn’t the police protest? It’s their city too.”
“Their planet,” Saul added. “Their Madre Tierra.”
“Terra,” Marco corrected, and chuckled. “This isn’t la Spagna.” He put on a professorial air. “But what exactly are they protesting, hmm? What do they hope to accomplish? Do they hope to move their prime minister? The European Parliament? Your idiot President?” Marco could still be Italian, when he chose. “Politics has failed. Your so-called democracies are only tyrannies by another name. Worse, they are incompetent tyrannies.” He lifted his empty Champagne glass and turned it over expressively. “The next hyperstorm will drown this city forever, just like Guangzhou and Mumbai and Miami before it. And what will be the response of the world’ governments? Higher taxes and an ever-thickening web of regulations, strangling the innovation we need to fly out of this mess.”
“Or float out of it,” murmured Saul, sotto voce.
“How can you say that so calmly?” Suzanne snapped.
Marco shrugged. “You know the truth as well as I do, my dear. No one better.” He pretended to scroll his palm—still the gesture by which most people somatized their meshes into showing them their newest messages. “You have more time to follow the news.”
“That’s a rotten thing to say,” she flashed. Marco raised his hands in mock surrender. She appealed to Saul. “Don’t we have some responsibility to other people? To society?”
Saul shrugged. Marco spoke. “One of the things I’ve always loved about Suzanne is how clear-eyed she can be. She’s not usually sentimental. I’m surprised, really. It must be the pregnancy.”
“For a genius you can really be an idiot,” she told him.
“She used to be more realistic,” Marco said. “She will be again.”
It had been something of a scandal, the day that Marco Vespucci was spotted handing Suzanne Croy out a limousine at Davos. Just three months earlier she’d lost her appeal to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Personal Operating System of Harrison Moore, gadfly of the tech industry and prophet of the Singularity, herald of the coming of the superintelligence that would make large-language models and neural learning networks look like a caveman’s first attempts at striking fire. He had sued on behalf of his Concord-made POS, not merely to have it recognized as a sentient being with the attendant rights but as having the right to possess and reproduce its own code—to own its own intellectual property. If Suzanne had succeeded, it would have undermined Concord’s core business to the point of bankruptcy. Moore up to that time had been widely dismissed as a crank, nothing for serious men like Marco Vespucci to fear. Suzanne, on the other hand—Suzanne was something else. She’d dropped out of sight after SCOTUS ruled against them, 10-1, but when she’d reappeared in public on Marco’s arm, Saul was the only one unsurprised.
He knew her like few other men knew her. And he had thought she understood him.
“So romantic,” Suzanne murmured now. Marco kissed her behind the ear and she squirmed irritably away.
“To be realistic is to be romantic.” Marco appealed to Saul. “We have to accept the facts. Look at them, splashing in the water, playing in the sea. It’s too late to roll it back now. It’s absorbed as much heat as it can, as much carbon as it can. When the sea turns over the land must follow. It will be a universal desert. It will only look like water.”
“And that’s where you want us all to live,” Suzanne said flatly. Her eyes had found the little girl with the tambourine and the painted face. “On a boat in the desert. Didn’t somebody say once that being on the water was like being in jail, only with the chance of being drowned?”
Saul’s mesh told him the saying could be attributed to a Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., but he thought it was better not to mention it.
“Not all,” Marco said easily. “A chosen few.”
“The world isn’t ending, Marco,” Suzanne said. “The world doesn’t just stop, no matter how bad things get. There still have to be laws, politics, people trying to live together. A protest like this means something.” She was still looking at the little girl. Saul wondered who she was speaking to now, him or her husband. “They’re alive, here and now.”
“We must cultivate the future,” Marco said. “Right, Saul? The needs of the years ahead of us outweigh the needs of the now.”
“It’s inhuman,” Suzanne murmured.
“It’s reality.” Marco pointed at the crowd. “I feel for these people, I do. I have no wish to promote suffering. It’s precisely such suffering that needs to end. But there’s no use protesting the laws of physics.”
“It isn’t physics, it’s us.”
“You might as well protest the Titanic,” Marco said, shrugging. “The iceberg doesn’t care. When the ship sinks it’s time to get off.”
“You know who deserts a sinking ship?” Suzanne said hotly. “Rats.”
“Very intelligent animals,” said Saul. Suzanne glared at him and he raised his hands. “Sorry.”
“We can agree to disagree,” Marco said smoothly. “But this is a time for celebrating! A dark time, yes, but it’s the only time we have. That makes it the right time, our time, the future’s time. Time for Concord!” He refilled his glass and Saul’s; Suzanne’s first drink had gone untouched. “It’s all right to drink it,” Marco assured her. “One glass of Dom won’t hurt her.”
“Her?” Saul squeaked.
Marco looked at him strangely. “The baby is a girl. We’ve already done a chromosome count.”
Saul’s fingers tightened around the stem of his glass. If Marco already knew that Suzanne’s baby was a girl, what else did he know?
Suzanne was staring at the protestors. “We can’t just ignore these people,” she said doggedly. The chants were getting louder. “We have to listen to what they’re saying.”
Marco cocked an ear. “’There will be no lifeboats,’” he said, shrugging. “They’re wrong.” He drank.
Suzanne got to her feet. The two men watched in silence as she unhooked her Louboutins from her heels and dropped them on her chair. She stalked off, wading onto the square. Saul rose from his seat but felt Marco’s hand on his arm.
“Let her go,” Marco said quietly.
Saul sat down again and they watched her as she joined the crowd of protestors, becoming part of the march. The startled reactions rippled toward the center of the crowd: even if the people didn’t immediately recognize a famous face, their meshes did. The ripple became jubilant. With a little flourish an elderly man handed over to her his sign bearing the slogan Non ci saranno scialuppe di salvataggio. A wordy language, Italian.
“There will be no lifeboats,” Marco repeated. He peered through his refilled glass, through which appeared a golden Venice, lit starlike by clinging bubbles. He took a sip. “We know better, don’t we? Only Concord is better than a lifeboat, better than any island or silo or satellite. They don’t realize it’s them we’re saving. All of them. All of this.” His gesture took in San Marco, Venice, the artworks he’d already absconded with. “Il patrimonio,” he mused.
Suzanne chanted and marched. The men watched. The people shouted, exultant. But the sun was going down, and the water in which she waded was turning cold. It was strange how the memory shifted, how it was his own face and Marco’s he now saw through Suzanne’s eyes, sitting at a distance, expressions unreadable. Her belly seemed to burn, seemed to blossom with sharp light that cast the square into shadow, turned his eyes and Marco’s into black hollows in white skulls. A ripple of pain, a halo of something brighter than light—
Saul sat up in his own bed, in Concord, in the house of Mrs. Dodge, tears stinging his eyes.
His head ached, his throat was dry. He thought about Dr. Jee’s pills. If he took one he’d sleep so deeply no dreams would reach him. But if the only contact he could have with Suzanne came through his dreams, how could he risk losing that?
There was something strange about the stillness of the room—a stillness that someone had touched. He saw, protruding from underneath his bedroom door, a white slip of paper. Now what?
He crouched and read: S—We need to talk—RP.
The Commodore, Nikolai, Sergei, Lila. Now the Painter, it appeared, wanted a word. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “They’re all coming out of the woodwork.”
It was a Saturday, and the navigators had found for the village a convincing simulacrum of a perfect September day. Picnickers flocked to the Green or threw stones from the edge of the Pond, or gathered in front of the bandshell where an elderly cover band worked its way through the back catalog of the Rolling Stones. Couples in Edwardian dress tapped croquet balls with their mallets, sipping gin fizzes between rounds. As per usual a few amateur painters were out with their easels and sketchbooks, trying to capture the crowds in their late summer plumage. But only one of them was the man Saul thought of as the Painter, standing at some distance from the crowd in the shade of a birch tree, studying his canvas with a critical eye.
He was a Black man maybe ten or fifteen years older than Saul, with a long doleful face, wearing his usual uniform of chinos, a beige windbreaker, and a battered fisherman’s cap. Although they shared a house and landlady, Saul hardly ever saw him, though he sometimes heard him padding to and from the bathroom late at night. He never took his meals in the dining room where Saul and Hank were regaled by Mrs. Dodge with the boardinghouse classics she liked to serve: meatloaf, lasagna, casseroles of every description. “Sticks to your ribs,” she said cheerfully, but the Painter was a cadaverous man who seemed vaguely offended by the idea of food. Once in a while Saul spotted an empty plate outside his door with the crusts of a cheese sandwich on it, nothing more. A frugal man. The bill of his cap swiveled slightly as Saul strode up to where he was standing on the grass.
“I got your message, Ray.”
Saul knew little about Raymond Pettibone, Jr., other than his name. He was an anomalous character, though in many ways he fit right into the islanders’ array of carefully cultivated eccentricities.He kept himself to himself—Mrs. Dodge called him, “Mr. Seldom,” as in seldom seen. Still, on the rare occasions Saul had seen him, he’d been struck by the alertness of his hawklike eyes. Not at all the shareholder type, Saul had thought,but people have a way of surprising you.
“Apparently not.” Ray kept his eyes on his painting, but his voice—a baritone foghorn honk—was tinged with disgust. “Have you got no sense of subtlety? You just walk up to me here out in the open, where anyone can see?”
“Why shouldn’t I walk up to say hello to someone I practically live with?” Saul demanded. “It might have seemed stranger if I didn’t.”
Shaking his head, Ray dabbed at his palette with his brush, and addressed the canvas. Saul moved behind him to get a better look. It showed the Green and its bandshell and the outlined rooftops of Concord’s modest skyline, but no people whatsoever, giving it a desolate quality. The brushtrokes had an impasto, stylized quality to them. Saul cleared his throat. “Do you do commissions?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.” Ray kept his eyes on his canvas. “But I wasn’t trying to drum up business.”
“Consider it a pretext, then,” Saul suggested. “Since you seem to think some subterfuge might be necessary.” The Painter shrugged. “What is it you wanted?”
The Painter drew a line through a dollop of dark green paint with the long nail of his index finger. “I heard about your little incident.”
“Oh?” said Saul, his voice neutral.
“Would have been impossible not to hear it,” Ray said. “I was in my room when the Constable came up the other night. Just about tore your place apart, it sounded like.” He glanced at Saul, a slight smile on his face. “He must not have found what he was looking for.”
“I have no idea what he was looking for.”
“That’s curious,” Ray said. He was applying a layer of metallic gray paint to the roofline. Saul thought, if he took a few steps back, that it might just look like the slight shimmer the projectors had when there was too much moisture in the air. “Because I do.”
“What?”
The Painter looked back and forth , to see if anyone might be listening, but there was no one within a hundred yards. He leaned in to hoarsely whisper, “A boat.”
“A boat,” Saul said. “A boat in my room.”
Ray made a swirling gesture in the air with his paintbrush. “Evidence of a boat. Evidence of contact with a boat.”
Saul said, calmly enough he thought, “What would make you believe such an insane thing?”
“Because I’ve seen it,” the Painter said. He stepped back, studied his painting. “You think the Constable didn’t discover your little hiding place?” The frown turned into a sly smile. “Lucky for you I found it first.”
Saul opened his mouth to protest. The Painter waved his brush dismissively again. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I put it back.”
"How do you know the bag came from a boat?” Saul said after a pause. “It could be my stuff from the mainland.”
“That would come as news to Monsieur Méyé, I think.”
Saul noticed his fists were clenched. He unclenched them. “What is it you want?”
The Painter looked surprised. “I should think it was obvious,” he said. “I want the boat.”
“There isn’t any boat.”
“What happened to it?”
“They probably sunk it.”
“Probably?” Ray waved his brush under Saul’s nose. “Did you see it happen?”
“No. But why wouldn’t they?”
“Why would they?” Ray’s voice was eager. “Let’s say they didn’t. What if it’s still around? Maybe they’ve got it tucked away somewhere.”
“Why are you so interested?” Saul asked. “Someplace you need to be?”
“I don’t know.” Saul thought for a moment. “Hygiene protocol would likely be to sink the thing.”
“Yes.” He was mixing cyan and chromium white. “Home.”
“Home,” said Saul incredulously. “We are home. This is as ‘home’ as we’re ever going to get.”
“The hell it is,” Ray said, meeting his eyes. “Whatever you call this place, you sure as shit can’t call it home.”
“Maybe you don’t remember Launch Day,” Saul said. “It was pretty chaotic. Rioters destroyed the campus. Cities on fire. The fucking Internet crashed. There’s nothing left. Nothing worth going back to, that’s for sure.”
“We don’t know that,” Ray said. He added a gunmetal blue dab to the lower edge of a cloud. “But we do know that there may be a boat. And if we can find it, we can use it.”
“‘We,’” Saul said hoarsely. “What makes you think we want to go anywhere?”
“You like it here, huh.” The Painter used his fingertips to work the blue paint into tufted whorls. “You’re satisfied.”
“Damn right, I’m satisfied,” Saul said, putting as much force behind the words as he could. “And you’d better be satisfied, too. Don’t even think about trying to blackmail me. I’m a Founder. Who are they going to believe, me or you?”
Saul started to walk away. The Painter called after him. “Hey, Saul! How about that commission, huh? I do a nice portrait. How about one of your old girlfriend?” He waited a beat. “Mrs. Vespucci?”
Saul spun on his heel and strode back toward him until they were face to face. “Say her name a second time,” he said softly. “See what happens.”
They were so close the long brim of Ray’s cap nearly bumped Saul’s forehead. This close, despite his anger, Saul could see something uncomfortably familiar in the Painter’s eyes. They reminded him of his own eyes, in the mirror. In his dream…
“It’s your world,” Ray said. He touched the brim of his cap in ironic salute.
Saul stalked away. The small crowd around the bandshell smattered applause as “Brown Sugar” came to its conclusion. Ray watched him go, smiling slightly.
“Yes, sir,” he said to himself. “Yes, sir.”
With the tip of his brush he drew a floating black question mark onto his canvas.
