A tangent or parallel of Bacigalupi’s SF Classic “The Water Knife”, which was a look into one possibility of how the society of a few decades from now around the US Midwest may experience life.
“The story of this diner, and this strip mall?”
One guy down the counter laughed out loud, nearly a spit take into his coffee. He wiped his lips with a napkin and then spoke.
“Well, this is the whole original place, and here we are, and we’re in the same spot on the map as we always were.”
He gestured out the front windows, which were of an old style, with glass doors and metal handbars to open and close them. To either side were large windows spreading the length of the diner from chest height up to the lowish ceiling, which was much wider than it was long.
The three particular large catamarans directly across from the wide promenade and boardwalk leading to the docks rose up on legs high enough that their streamlined prows bobbed up and down lightly in and out of sight at the top of the windows.
From this point, the story could be true two ways.
I guess I’ll tell the less exciting one first, but it has just as much water in it. You may be too young to remember when “too much salt water” was a complaint of the World.
Now that we have balance, it’s easier to talk about all these things. Though, they were exciting times, and I worry that perhaps we risk much forgetting what being so immediately alive felt like, physically, I mean. Sure, we all are fit and well and we work hard and bruise our shins and compare scars, but being able to cast our sight out farther, of being focused on helping the Galaxy and hence the fleet of other Galaxies out there, sometimes that may make us forget that our contribution comes from our struggle.
Sorry, I ramble sometimes. I’m younged again lately for a time out, so of course I want to explain things you probably already know.
Oh, here’s the part where the first way starts:
“Oh, how was the weather when you came in? I have to leave in a few minutes and I won’t look until I get to my Ship.”
This said by a young woman at one of the booths.
The young woman in foreign clothes looked at her, the one who had asked about the incongruity of the diner and strip mall with the more modern town. She blinked once, perhaps to hide her admiration as she looked at the woman in the booth with the catamaran crew clothing. No way to tell if it was a uniform, with only the one of her to look at.
“There is a reasonably predictable storm whose edge will give us some heavy squalls, but sees won’t raise the boardwalk today for twenty miles out in a South by Southeast track. Should be settling by tomorrow sunrise, for a calm but overcast today?”
The woman nodded.
“Thanks. I think you mean seas, though.”
“Thank you. Seas, then.”
The man who decided to explain it was behind the counter, in front of another man who could be seen working to prepare food. Mostly everyone was listening, but only just. You couldn’t see the food, as the wall was high enough for him to be able to comfortably put the plates on the steel shelf, underneath infrared lamps, but the smell was for everyone in the restaurant delicious but only unfamiliar to the traveler.
Leftiger 