Water Rites
It's the future. Our future. We argued over global warming, we studied it, we fought over who should cut emissions first. And it got warmer. And warmer. Now we have a generation who have never taken water for granted. Water is life. Water is power...if you control it. The United States has joined with Canada and Mexico to build the Rocky Mountain Trench Reservoir that runs from Great Slave Lake down into the middle of the United States, storing and conserving precious water from the arctic tundra. But everyone has to share and as the planet continues to warm that share is shrinking.
Jeremy was born in the Dry, son of a tough, stubborn farmer pumping a trickle from dying wells to water a survival crop. He was born crippled and you don't waste precious water on cripples, neither animal nor child. But along with his deformed joints he inherited the ability to see the land the way it used to be -- to reach back and touch yesterday.
Dan Geely was a drifter, a kid who grew up hard on the fringes of a society that no longer had much charity to offer. When he ran into Jeremy with his visions of yesterday, his life turned in a different direction and took him back to the Columbia Riverbed where he had started.
Nita was a silent child who stopped speaking after she witnessed the murder of her father, a water-strike organizer in the dry Columbia Riverbed. Able to hear the emotions of others, she hid from people until the search for her lost husband brought her back to the town she had vowed never to revisit.
Carter Voltaire is an officer of the Corps of Engineers, the keepers of the water in this dry future, the armed fist of Water Policy. There is only so much water. Water Policy decides who gets it and The Corps makes sure it gets there. A survivor of the terrible Chicago Water Riot, he arrives at The Dalles as the new CO, determined that such bloodshed will never happen here. But The Dalles has to cut the water and local terrorists begin to kill his troops and attack the pipe. Standing between the hostile local farmers and his need to protect his people and the water, Voltaire struggles to prevent another bloody riot. As his fate and the future of The Dalles becomes entwined with that of Dan Greely Nita, and Jeremy, disaster looms on the horizon.