6. Three Washerwomen
Once upon a time, long before New Ark’s first flood, there were retaining walls along the two main riverstreams that flowed across it and into the rising Passaic. Called the Watsessing and Yantecaw rivers by those who lived there before, these tributaries were polluted, bound to commerce and exploitation, and renamed the Second and Third rivers. They were sources of food, then open sewers, then hindrances to real-estate development, then boosters of property values, then public trash receptacles, then protectorates of the administrative state and its environmental protection bureaucracy, and then everything changed. The walls decayed and crumbled into their streams, creating new and unexpected bodies of water, but also cutting off the free flow of fresh water through the city, and only Prince Appall undertook to clear the fresh waterways for the free use of the people, for which he was applauded and excused much of his ill treatment of them. Still, though the people had managed to maintain their own pipes and plumbing, the public waterworks—reservoirs, sewers, treatment facilities, storage—remained as they had been: inconsistent and unreliable in function and quality since before the North Atlantic wars. Water was Appall’s only valuable public work, and his death by it must finally judge that work a failure.
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