The old offices were now a seafront apartment, very smart. And the name was no longer in the directories. But Diana was, living in one of the big group houses in the upper town; and happy to see Maya show up at her door, happy to go out to lunch with her and tell her all about the current situation in the local water world, which was still her work.

“Most of the Deep Waters people moved straight into the Hellas Sea Institute.” This was an interdisciplinary group, composed of representatives from all the agricultural co-ops and water stations around the basin, as well as fisheries, the University of Odessa, and all the towns on the coast, and all the settlements higher in the the basin’s extensive rimland watersheds. The seaside towns in particular were intensely interested in stabilizing the sea’s level at just above the old minus-one-kilometer contour, just a few-score meters higher than the North Sea’s current level. “They don’t want sea level to change by even a meter,” Diana said, “if it can be helped. And the Grand Canal is useless as a runoff canal to the North Sea, because the locks need water flowing in both directions. So it’s a matter of balancing the inflow from aquifers and rainfall, with evaporation loss. That’s been fine so far. Evaporation loss is slightly higher than the precipitation into the watershed, so every year they draw down the aquifers a few meters. Eventually that’ll be a problem, but not for a long time, because there’s a good aquifer reserve left, and they’re refilling a bit now, and may more in the future. We’re hoping precipitation levels will also rise over time, and they have been so far, so they probably will continue to, for a while longer anyway. I don’t know. That’s the main worry, anyway; that the atmosphere will suck off more than the aquifers can resupply.”

“Won’t the atmosphere finally hydrate fully?”

“Maybe. No one is really sure how humid it will get. Climate studies are a joke, if you ask me. The global models are just too complex, there are too many unknown variables. What we do know is that the air is still pretty arid, and it seems likely it will get more humid. So, everybody believes what they want, and goes out there and tries to please themselves, and the environmental courts keep track of it all as best they can.”

“They don’t forbid anything?”

“Oh yeah, but only big heat pumpers. The small stuff they don’t mess with. Or at least they didn’t used to. Lately the courts have been getting tougher, and tackling smaller projects.”

“It’s exactly the smaller projects that would be most calculable, I should think.”