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mention the decor and menu of their restaurant. Pining for Lost Louisianne was their stock-in-trade, and you couldn’t eat oysters bienville and crayfish gumbo from their kitchen without a dripping garnish of Spanish moss and True Blue climatological revanchism.
    Father’s folks, on the other hand, having been enriched by thewarming of Siberia and the consequent boom times to the point of being able to live off it through decades of permanent midcareer crisis, had their own class self-interest in viewing the brave and balmy new world through Green-colored glasses.
    Nor was the conflict ameliorated when Father—under the baleful Blue influence of Mother and her family, or so
his
family saw it—chose the career of climatech engineer, spiting one’s parents and impressing one’s girlfriend by declaring oneself an enemy of their class being a youthful mode never likely to go out of fashion.
    Thus, when Monique’s two sets of grandparents
did
speak to each other, they did it at the top of their lungs, and often enough with the destiny of their darling granddaughter as the dialectical shuttlecock.
    Given this girlhood, it was not without her own enthusiastic consent that Monique’s parents, when the time came, decided to extract her from this ideological battleground by sending her to university in America. Nor was it without political cunning.
    Her maternal grandparents approved on nostalgic Blue grounds and recommended Tulane, which had been re-established on suitably muggy swampland in bayou suburbs of St. Louis.
    Her paternal grandparents concurred on practical career grounds—an Anglophone higher education was essential, even the mighty Siberians were constrained to interface with the rest of the world in English—but assumed it would be Berkeley or Stanford or one of those Newer Age universities endowed by the major syndics headquartered in the lotus land of the Pacific Northwest.
    Instead, it was Columbia, in New York, a city whose political hue was ambiguous enough to leave both sets of grandparents equally dissatisfied. A city far more hard-edged than climatologically blessed Paris, where, or so her parents hoped, Monique would herself gain a keener appreciation of the unfortunate fact that there were people for whom the warming was not all palm trees and long golden afternoons in the Jardin des Plantes without being exiled to durance vile and a third-rate education in some truly grim Land of the Lost metropolis.
    Monique shuddered a little inside as she began to descend the stairs leading down to the pedicab stand on West End Avenue. She knew it was irrational, but she also knew it would be unnatural ever to get used to
this
.
    Seawall Avenue was about five meters above the Hudson, and from this perspective, when she looked west, the surface of the river seemed more or less at eye level. But West End Avenue was not just east of Seawall Avenue, it was
down
.
    Ten meters down.
    Meaning that halfway down the staircase the surface of the river was
above her head
. The dormitory studio she had been assigned as a student had been on the first floor. This had not seemed significant until the first time she had stood atop Seawall Avenue to catch the view over the river and then looked east and back whence she had come and realized the awful truth.
    The place she lived in was
below sea level
. Every night she slept with a threatening ocean towering over her head. Even now, up on the eleventh floor, she still had the occasional nightmare about it.
    That had been what the Third Force mystics called the satori. If her parents had sent her to New York to develop a True Blue social conscience, that had been the moment they had succeeded. That was when Monique had gotten the big picture.
    Living down there in the city below the waterline, dreaming at night of tidal waves washing over her, slogging her way through the chronically flooded streets, impoverished by the sky-high survival taxes, shoulder-to-shoulder, cheek-by-jowl,