"Two-Tailed Fish"

At night, children should have been in bed, falling asleep to fairy tales. The choir at the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute had been replaced by men, who sang hymns in Italian to the accompaniment of an organ.

They could have sung boatmen's tunes instead, like the one Alessandro had once sung outside the church, about wanting a house with a well.

The basic principle of desalination was much like nature's water cycle. Seawater was heated by sunlight and turned into vapor, then drifted with the wind toward land, where it fell as rain. The rain gathered into rivers, lakes, and seas, nourished plants and animals, and eventually returned to the ocean.

Salt, being too heavy, could not drift upward. Freshwater flowing back from rivers combined with it, turning it into seawater.

In the film The Day After Tomorrow, melting glaciers sent vast amounts of freshwater into the ocean, disrupting ocean currents and throwing the climate into chaos. Human cities were destroyed by tornadoes and tsunamis, and humanity entered another Ice Age.

One byproduct of desalination was salt. If Pomona's idea could be realized—using bags of salt instead of steel gates to temporarily block off river mouths—then a desalination project could not only solve the islanders' water shortage, but also use the salt byproduct for flood control.

At the British Museum, she had seen new-energy power generation. Solar energy probably would not work, but a tidal power station could solve Venice's electricity problem. The heat produced during desalination could also provide heating for the residents.

It was a plant called glasswort that had enabled Venice to produce transparent glass, which Galileo had then used to make astronomical telescopes.

When Moses led the Hebrews across the desert, many could no longer endure the lack of water. Thirst was not something