Something More Than Night by Ian Tregillis

Huxley novel, part rickety gas-station rest stop door, part elevator door, part of the car door that had broken Molly’s pinky finger when she was thirteen.
    But none of that mattered. It was a door. What mattered was the other side. Where did Molly want to go?
    *   *   *
    Sunset cast sanguine shadows across rings of terraced landscaping. Molly stood at the lip of the floundering agricultural co-op where the Calhoun lake bed had been. Molly had seen old photos. Hard to believe there had been a time when there had been that much freestanding water right in the middle of the city. The water crisis had peaked before Molly was born; things were slowly improving. Maybe someday they’d let it be a lake again.
    For now it was neither fish nor fowl. The lake was long gone, but the site wasn’t yet a productive grower. Lake Calhoun had rested upon a bed of glacial till packed into a trough etched eons ago into the limestone detritus of an ancient sea. Ria led the effort to remediate the soil one hard-fought quarter acre at a time, leaching away countless decades of motorboat oil and Jet Ski fuel leaked from the surrounding jetties, fertilizer runoff from the surrounding homes, and industrial runoff from the surrounding city. All without removing what few nutrients the biological decay of lake grasses had sprinkled into the cold, lightless lake bed.
    It was hard work, and, so far, a losing battle. Most of the terraces were empty. They stepped down in an irregular ring defining contours of the original lake bed, almost a mile across at the widest spot; the bottom was almost eighty feet deep. Molly stood at ground level with six levels stretched beneath her like the edges of an inverted ziggurat. Perhaps someday it would be Ria’s very own hanging garden of Babylon. If she had her way with nature.
    A few dozen feet, maybe fifty, of the terrace lacked the ochre and butterscotch tones of poisoned soil and the glassy blue-gray of low-carbon stonefoam. There, a cool breeze ruffled a green fringe of soy, alfalfa, and wheatgrass. Beans of some variety had thrown feelers over the terrace wall. A handful of people labored on the first and second levels. Sweaty men in sleeveless shirts, women with bandannas over their hair. Everybody had a suntan and thick shoulders. Nobody was Ria.
    The soil, Molly knew, was planted with genetically engineered low-water varieties. There had been a time when people made a distinction between the genetically enhanced varieties and “heritage” strains of domesticated plants, but nowadays nobody gave a shit about something so obviously pointless. Too much cross-pollination between test plots; too much apathy. Too many hungry people left behind as the grain belts shifted and withered.
    The new growth wouldn’t be mature and ready for harvest before winter. Nobody would eat from these plants. A waste of water, energy, and hard-earned nutrients. But, Molly supposed, that wasn’t the point. It was also a proof of concept. Demonstration of a healthy, viable project. She read Ria’s handwriting in that. Even if I’m wrong, leave it to me.…
    Stately homes with vast green lawns and towering oaks encircled the lake bed. Neo-Tudor manses, coral pink Bahamian villas, modern knife-blade houses built of glass and ceramic, Spanish-style haciendas, some fat shed-style houses, even an earth home or two. This had been a well-heeled part of town for well over a century; these people could afford water. Here, conservation was a crisis-driven mandate: the unwelcome collision of distant concerns with a comfortable life.
    The breeze stiffened into a gust; Molly inhaled. The wind carried the stink of mud and compost from the lake bed, but even that couldn’t hide the humidity or the fecund scent of the trees and grasses all around her. It lay on the air so thickly even her human senses could pick it out. But there was so much more. She could smell trace amounts of century-old boat fuel, the lifeblood of a two-stroke