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only salvation. And you and I, Mr. Groundwater, here and now, in this very conversation, are laying the first foundation stone in the project that will save mankind. I have the qualifications. I studied astronautics in Poznan, before the flooding came. I contributed to European space missions. I have a doctorate in the writings of Tsiolkovsky. With your resources, and my vision—yes, we will build a spaceship, a spacegoing ark.”
    Patrick felt railroaded. “I believe you’re manipulating me, Dr. Glemp. You’re so sure I share your dream?”
    “I know you do.” Glemp glanced down at Holle. “I asked Nathan about you. Your daughter was born in 2019; she must have been conceived shortly after you heard Dr. Thandie Jones outline the end of the world to the IPCC. She was conceived in hope.”
    Patrick felt his face redden. But the odd little man was right. After he and Linda had listened to Thandie, and seen the dispiriting response of her audience—and even after they had been forced to flee the hurricane that had so suddenly struck Manhattan afterward—they had gone back to their home in Newburgh, New Jersey, along with other refugees from New York City, and had shared a meal and a bottle of wine, and thrown out their contraceptives. Holle had indeed been conceived in hope, in defiance of the blackness of the future as it had seemed then. She had even been named for the role he and Linda had imagined she might have to play.
    “So come,” Jerzy Glemp said. “We have much to do. It is time for lunch. You may buy me a drink, and we must start to plan how we will save mankind, and spend your money in the process.” He led the way out into the street.
    Patrick picked up a sleepy Holle and followed, wondering what the hell he was getting himself into.

8
    T he next morning a courier arrived at the Brown Palace bearing a handwritten note addressed to Patrick Groundwater: “Personal—Your Eyes Only—Do Not Disclose Contents.”
    The courier was just a kid, a boy aged about fourteen, in an anonymous AxysCorp—brand coverall. In a world full of hungry refugees, you didn’t have to be too rich to afford a runner. But even so, in a world that was almost paper-free, it was an unusual way to receive a message. Patrick had Alice Sylvan tip the kid and sent him away. Then, as Holle was eating her room-service breakfast in the suite’s main living room, Patrick, following the spirit of the note, took it to the bathroom, huddled in a corner he thought had to be free of prying surveillance cameras, and opened it.
    The note was from Edward Kenzie. Handwritten like its envelope, it invited him to come to the Auraria campus at ten a.m. that morning, “to attend the launch of a new project.” Feeling mildly foolish, Patrick ripped the note into shreds and flushed them down the lavatory.
    Then he went back to the living room, gulped another coffee, and helped Holle get ready for her day.
     
     
     
    It was a morning of sun and scattered cloud. The warmth and light lifted everybody’s mood, and Holle skipped as they made their way across town, cutting southwest down Larimer Street to the bridge over Cherry Creek to the campus. Alice Sylvan, nightstick in her left hand and her right resting on her gun holster, smiled as Holle peered into the concreted-in creek. From here, Patrick could see the shoulders of the Rockies to the west, and the quartz splinters of Denver’s small downtown to the east.
    They reached the campus. Patrick had attended Yale and Oxford. Auraria, shared by three colleges, must once have been like a redbrick movie-set mock-up of a traditional campus, he thought, with broad leafy avenues set amid acres of car parks. Some of the academic buildings still functioned; in a federal capital there was still a need for college-level educated. But many of the buildings had been abandoned to housing and the athletics fields plowed up for crops.
    The note directed Patrick and his party to the campus library and media