“No, darling. I mean Federal.”
“Federal?” Lila sighed. Federal people rarely bothered her, but when they did it was never pleasant. What environmental edict were they obsessing about now? “Okay.” She turned to face her screen. “Put ’em on.”
“I mean they’re here,” Seymour said. “A youngie-girl.”
“In person?” Lila swiveled in her chair. She tried to remember the last time anyone had made a call on her in person. What made Federal think she had the time for in person? More ominously, what did Federal need that they sent a real person?
Seymour brought in the Federal, a tall woman—good Lord, did they take them straight out of college these days?—with an eager, open face and an athlete’s stride. The youngie sat.
“What a surprise!” said Lila. “You’re really a Federal? Who do you represent, exactly?”
“I’m from Agriculture,” the youngie said, dipping her head. The Department of Agriculture had planned and now controlled the Grid. Since the Gridding, Agriculture had become a shameful part of the government. People had been known to pretend they worked in other parts of the government. It took, Lila suspected, an act of will and faith to half-stand and extend her hand across Lila’s desk. “Michelle Everly.”
“Michelle,” Lila said. “Lila de Becqueville.” A lovely face, Lila realized, sculpted and high-cheekboned. The lashes at the corners of Michelle’s eyes tangled in a wanton way. A slight scent of lemon to her, probably perfume.
“I’ve heard about you,” Michelle said, settling herself back in the chair. “I’ve heard you have an excellent system. Best treatment system of any city your size. Superior flood protection, aquifer maintenance, nice leach fields, reliable sewage …”
“Thank you.” Everything she’d said was true. The Water Queen, Lila called herself. Not that she told anyone this.
“My mother remembers you coming to her school,” Michelle said, reddening slightly. Michelle’s mother! Lila was shocked at how this dated her, and she made it into a curse: tu madre. “You used to give talks on the history of water in Ohio.”
Michelle’s face was eager and imploring. Inside herself, Lila felt something shifting. “Your mother remembers me?” she said. It was true: early in Lila’s career, twenty, twenty-five years before, she had given talks. This was during New Dawn Dayton, the halcyon period before the Short Times when all sorts of industry—including Prestige Polymer, Armitage Steel, even Consort and its premier nuclear plant—had come to Dayton because of the city’s abundance of water. Lila thought how little she remembered of Ohio’s water history now, although somewhere she still had the data chips.
“You talked about the Great Black Swamp. And malaria.”
“Lima, Ohio, was named after Lima, Peru,” Lila said. “They imported quinine from Peru as a malaria medicine.” Malaria in Ohio: people used to be incredulous when she told them. The drainage tile used to dry northwest Ohio could be stretched from the earth to the moon. The diversion of water from the Great Black Swamp had created lakes that were still, over a century and a half later, among Ohio’s largest. Now the lakes were recreational areas, but in their early years after their formation they were notorious for mosquitoes and disease, places a sensible person avoided.
Lila said, “You know they used to call Cincinnati Porkopolis. That was because of water, too.”
Michelle gave Lila a thrilling sidelong glance.
“They built a canal south from Middletown to the Ohio River,” Lila said. “Once the canal was built, farmers could move their pigs to Cincinnati, and from there the pigs could be shipped by boat east to Pennsylvania or west to the Mississippi. People don’t think about it, but water opens markets.” Lila was surprised at the fervor in her voice; she did remember. She glanced at Michelle. A young youngie, Lila thought with a wave of fatigue. Then she relaxed: if Federal really wanted something from her, they wouldn’t send a girl like this. “So what are you here for?” Lila said brightly. “Training? Advice? Employees?” Michelle’s lips were parted, her dark hair swept down her back. God, that long hair. Lila could brush that hair across Michelle’s mouth and kiss her lips through the curtain of it. She could lift it off her neck and nuzzle the pale spot behind her ear. Lila’s voice came out surprisingly husky. “You running a little dry up on the Grid?”
A spot at the end of Michelle’s nose turned suddenly red. A flaw, there was always a flaw. Even in her glory days Lila had had one. The flaw had been Lila’s profile, her slightly bulging stomach. Now her belly lay across her thighs like a sleeping cat. Suddenly Lila felt angry at Michelle’s bosses. A little training mission here, get out and talk up the old folks, the powers-that-be of this or that inconsequential city. The jerks that would send a young woman to do this. “Am I a little too close for comfort here?” Lila asked, her voice quickening. “You are running dry on the Grid? I’ll tell you what: you get me a steady power supply for my treatment plant and I’ll give you all the water you Agros want.”
For a second the youngie looked confused, then she drew herself up and pulled on an invisible jacket of authority. “We don’t have any influence over electricity. That’s Consort.” Lila was old enough to remember the days before Consort, the aggregation of utility companies that had grown up in the early twenties. It had seemed so logical then, Consortium, with states shipping electricity and gas and wind and solar power back and forth, but then Consortium got bigger and bigger, the nickname “Consort” used first by the more intelligent, referring—ha, ha!—to its relation to the government, then taken up and somehow euphemized by the company itself, making it a cheerful name, a name implying convenience and compatibility and even a gleeful communion. “Consort with us,” the top of each bill used to read.
“But you’re a Fed,” Lila said.
“Of course.” Michelle leaned forward eagerly. “Consort is a business. Who are we to interfere with business?” This was a slogan: when the Alliance leaders pointed out how America forgot the poor, Americans responded with a truism about business.
God, Lila hated these rote answers. “Then why are you here?” She demanded. “You seem to want to interfere with my business.”
“You’re water. You’re still regulated. Water is local.”
“But you want to make my water not local.” Lila leaned forward. She decided to mention the rumor she kept hearing. “You want to transport it, just like those farmers who sent their pigs to St. Louis. You need it to irrigate the Grid.”
Michelle’s face had become shiny, more blotches joining the red spot at the end of her nose. “No. Not the Grid. Definitely not the Grid.”
“Then where do you want to send it?”
Michelle leaned forward into Lila’s desk and pushed up her sleeves, as if Lila were finally asking a grown-up question. “People at Federal are smart. You’d be surprised: Federal is very realistic.”
Lila was quiet, waiting.
Michelle, silent, propped her chin on her hand and stared at the wall behind Lila’s head. What was back there? Lila thought suddenly, wanting to turn and look.
“Extremely realistic,” Michelle said, lifting a hand to smooth her hair.
A hand-drawn picture of a fanciful fish, flowing in a blue stream. A photomontage of a turbine and the outflow over a dam. An old poster—Lila’s favorite—from the We Save Wawa series, featuring a priest and a transvestite. The transvestite was actually (no one but Lila knew this) her assistant Seymour in his younger days. The We Save Wawa campaign had been a huge hit. Not that individual conservation really made a difference—industrial water use, in