Flood

by Stephen Baxter

  Gary laughed. “Actually that’s a pretty precise definition of a scientist’s core competence.”

  “Well, perhaps it is, but it doesn’t make you buggers any easier to deal with, does it?”

  “This is important, Piers,” Lily said. “If Thandie’s right—”

  “If she’s right she must be heard, of course. But from what I hear, I still believe the chances are she’s not right, for all that Nathan Lammockson would like it to be so.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I owe him a huge debt; I owe him my life. But in my judgment Lammockson is the sort of chap who longs for the apocalypse—you know, for everything to be pulled down around him, so that he can save us and build it all up again. He longs to live in times that provide a challenge commensurate with the stature he sees in himself. That’s not to say Thandie is wrong. It’s just that a man like Lammockson is predisposed to believe her catastrophic predictions.”

  Gary nodded. “Maybe. I do sometimes wonder if Nathan would keep the money flowing if Thandie’s results didn’t indicate that things are getting worse. Anyhow none of that proves she’s wrong.”

  “No indeed,” Piers said. “But there is a danger that in dreaming of fantastic catastrophes, we could fall into the trap of ignoring what’s real.”

  “Which is?”

  He paused and glanced around; they were at the intersection with 4th Street. “Come this way and I’ll show you.” He cut west for three blocks, leading confidently, until they reached Washington Square Park.

  It was another tent city, like Central Park. Smoke rose from fires, and every square meter as far as Lily could see was crammed with rows of grimy, mud-colored tents, broken up by the green monoliths of portaloos. There were hospital tents, food kitchens, shower blocks, water tankers; it looked like what it was, an exceptionally well-equipped refugee camp. But there was a strong police presence, with mounted cops patrolling the perimeter of the park, barbed-wire barriers everywhere. To the north a triumphal arch rose up above the huddled tents, a gesture from a more favored age. Flags flew from the arch, celebrating agencies such as Homeland Security, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and the city’s Office of Emergency Management. A poster proclaimed free classes in DNA genealogy, which demonstrated that most Americans had a heritage containing a whole rainbow of ethnicity. A choir of NYPD officers stood under the arch, singing mournful Irish ballads.

  There wasn’t a blade of grass to be seen; the whole park was churned to mud. The air was thick with the stench of smoke and sewage.

  Thandie said slowly, consulting her GPS, “Just here we’re at a kind of neck in the flooding. To the west you have a pretty extensive lake covering much of Greenwich Village, running as far as 14th Street. The riverside development over there is drowned too. And to the east there’s another major incursion, where the East River has risen over East Village and Alphabet City, lapping in as far as Second Avenue, even Third.” She looked up. “Right here we’re squeezed in the middle.”

  Piers said, “And this is where the refugees have come, the shopkeepers and restaurateurs and artists and writers and poets and whatnot from Greenwich from one direction, and the Puerto Ricans from Alphabet City from the other, along with a few wealthy white folk who colonized the gentrified areas west of Avenue B. Here they all are, living under canvas in Washington Square.”

  Gary asked, “With the police keeping them apart?”

  Piers said, “New York is a melting pot, they say. That’s being put to the test this year, I suppose. You can see they are running tolerance programs. Anyhow, do you see what I mean? Lily, we’ve discussed Nathan Lammockson and his grand gestures before. In my view this is the real work of the emergency, by doctors and nurses and firemen and police and immense numbers of volunteers, the endless task of providing shelter and food and warmth and averting disease—the task of preserving lives, one at a time. Why, I’m told this tent city has already seen a hundred births of its own, and more deaths, in the six weeks it’s been established. That’s what’s real. But this sort of project would never be glamorous enough for Nathan Lammockson to take an interest in. Well. Let’s walk on.”

  He led them back east, but walked them now across Broadway and through NoHo to the Bowery, and then cut south again, through Little Italy and Chinatown.

  Thandie said they were heading through another flooding bottleneck, with SoHo submerged to the west, and much of the Lower East Side to the east. Here there were no convenient green spaces to colonize and no obvious refugee camps, but the neighborhoods were quiet, tense. Piers said this had been the site of disorder when the river levels had breached ten meters, one catastrophic night before Christmas. Floods of East Side refugees, many of them first-generation immigrants, had poured into an area of a few blocks already crowded with an ethnically diverse community. Most of them had now been evacuated to the north.

  Piers’s group cut down Park Row, and came to the Civic Center at the foot of the great ramp that led up to the Brooklyn Bridge. And here they found another urban shore, where the street dipped into the water.

  “I guess that’s it,” Thandie said. She folded away the screen on her sleeve. “Nothing but floodwater from here on south.”

  The sun was low now, and Lily had to shield her eyes to look at the crowding buildings of the Financial District, from the Gothic pinnacle of the Woolworth Building a few blocks away to the gleaming new World Trade Center towers to the southeast, dominated by the extraordinary wedge shape of the tallest of them all, the Freedom Tower. But though water pooled in the shadowed canyons at the feet of the tower blocks, lights showed in their faces, and there was much activity on the water, boats skimming back and forth between the buildings.

  “So they’re still working in Wall Street,” Thandie said.

  “Yes,” Piers said. “Much of it is shutdown, mothballing and transfer of functions. But it’s good for the corporate image to have a presence in the disaster zone you’re making a profit out of.”

  Gary said, “And the Freedom Tower—”

  “Is where Nathan has set up Thandie’s presentation to the IPCC,” Piers said. “Nathan is nothing if not a showman. Though the Memorial is flooded, of course.”

  Thandie shaded her eyes. “It’s years since I was here. I’m sure that skyline looks different.”

  “Every so often a building falls,” said Piers. “They’re all built on good Manhattan schist. But their sub-basements are undermined, and their foundations aren’t designed for continual immersion in saline water. And then a storm comes along, and—There are generally few casualties; there’s plenty of notice. When they give way they explode, you know; the steel cables within the reinforced concrete structures are under tension.”

  Thandie asked, “So how do we get over there, swim?”

  “There’s an AxysCorp boat. I’ll call for it.” He walked away, speaking into the air. As he did so the guard who had shadowed them all the way from Central Park emerged from a shadowed street, nodding at Piers.

  A breeze ruffled Lily’s hair. She looked east, out toward the ocean. Clouds were scudding across the sky, a great dish of them spread along the horizon, and she remembered the storm that had diverted her plane.

  32

  From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

  According to his precisely worded blog, Harrison Gelertner was born and raised in San Francisco. He’d spent all his working life in that city; he had been a lawyer, specializing in civil rights cases. He had traveled the world—but oddly, through his wife’s taste for the exotic, mostly abroad, never much in his own country.

  Age sixty-five Gelertner retired. And age sixty-eight he found himself left alone when his wife succumbed to cancer; it was quick, shocking. And age sixty-nine he observed that large swathes of America, the country he had never seen, were fast disappearing under floodwater.

  He resolved to put right the gap in his experience, while he had the health and resources to do it—and while it was
still possible. He decided to begin at the top: at Washington, DC.

  Thus in February 2018 he caught an American Airlines flight into Washington National. As it happened this turned out to be one of the last civilian flights ever to reach that airport.

  On the face of it Washington wasn’t impressive. It struck Gelertner as just a small American city, and a shabby one at that, dirty and grimy and apparently unbearably hot in the summer, though the weather was pleasant enough on a crisp February day. The flooding was already apparent, the water bubbling out of the drains and sloshing over the sidewalks; it was difficult to walk. Sirens wailed, and traffic backed up everywhere. There was a sense of urgency, of things fraying, he recorded in his blog, everything grubby and falling apart.

  But then he turned a corner and came on the White House, just like that, the planet’s center of power practically in the middle of downtown. According to the news on the Angel radio his grandson had shown him how to use, the President and her administration had long fled to their refuge in Denver. But the protesters were still here, a ragged band of them opposite the gates, their banners complaining about taxes, foreign wars and inequities in flood relief. And there were headquarters of other tremendously important institutions only blocks away, like the FBI and NASA and the World Bank. It was a city that was somehow too small for its significance.

  He walked to the grassy expanse of the Mall, where the Washington Monument stood tall and slim. Gelertner oriented himself; there was the Capitol building to the east, the Lincoln Memorial sitting grandly to the west. The grass was soggy, giving under his leather shoes. Though he could explore the Lincoln Memorial as much as he pleased, the Capitol building was closed to visitors. And he was disappointed to find that the various Smithsonian museums were closed too, although there was much activity around them as staff bundled up precious exhibits for moving.

  He was vague about the progress of the flooding. That evening the TV news showed alarming images and maps of the threat to DC; the rising ocean had pushed into Chesapeake Bay, and was backing up the Potomac to the city. He wouldn’t have thought that DC would be under such immediate threat, but there you go, he recorded in his blog.

  He was woken in the night by a fire alarm. The hotel had to be evacuated.

  Gelertner had his airline ticket, but quickly learned the airport was closed. Unsure what to do, he stayed put. By mid-morning he found himself in a crowd of families, mostly black, mostly poor, waiting for a requisitioned school bus to take them to higher ground. Stern-looking Homeland Security guards made sure they didn’t try to get away from their allocated group, or compromise the convoys that were already underway, taking out the remaining federal government employees, major corporate players and the rich.

  Gelertner was out of the city by noon.

  That was pretty much all he saw of Washington, a city he happened to visit in the midst of its abandonment. He saw nothing significant of the flood itself. It struck him as strange that the very first visit he made to the capital, at the end of his own long life, might turn out to be one of the last made by any tourist, ever.

  Gelertner was particularly disappointed not to have got to see Apollo XI in the National Air and Space Museum. He never learned if the heavy capsule had been evacuated successfully.

  33

  Nathan Lammockson met them in an anteroom to the lecture theater, deep within the Freedom Tower, where Thandie was to present her results to a subcommittee of the IPCC. Thandie went off to wash and set up, and Piers disappeared, having business of his own with the IPCC delegates. Gary was called away to talk to other climatologists in the building, from NOAA’s hurricane center in Miami and elsewhere. They were being tapped up by local weather watchers who were growing concerned about that incoming ocean storm, now referred to as system Aaron.

  So it was just Lily who sat beside Nathan Lammockson, on a balcony that overlooked the theater where Thandie would present. The room was sparsely populated, a dozen of the hundred or so seats occupied by middle-aged types with the eccentric dress sense, hair styles and facial fluff that seemed to mark out the professional scientist. They knew each other, it seemed, and held conversations leaning over the backs of their seats. They ignored Thandie, who was scrolling through her presentation. In the air before her was a big three-dimensional display that held a translucent image of the whole Earth. It spun before Thandie’s touch; Lily could see her earnest face through the planet’s ghostly layers.

  Lammockson sucked on a coffee, and leaned over to Lily. “Quite a view we’ve got here.”

  “Yes. I like Thandie’s three-D projector.”

  He glanced at her. “I guess you haven’t seen a crystal ball before?”

  “I missed a lot of the new toys while I was stuck down those cellars in Barcelona.”

  “Yeah. The principle’s simple, as I understand it. It’s a fool-the-eye thing.” He lifted his hand upright and mimed rotation. “You have a translucent screen, upright like this, spinning a thousand times a minute. And you have three projectors firing light at it, through systems of lenses and mirrors. So at any instant you have a slice through the three-dimensional object you’re looking at. Spin it up and those slices merge in the vision. Terrific tool in medicine, I’m told. Surgery, you know, scans of skulls with tumours in ’em, that kind of thing. Of course they’re mostly used for porn.”

  That made her laugh. “Actually, looking down on Thandie like this, I feel like I’m about to watch surgery.”

  He grunted. “Well, so you are, in a way. These arseholes will do their very best to dissect whatever Thandie puts before them. You got to understand how the IPCC works, Lily, what it’s for . . .”

  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been established by the governments back in the 1980s to provide authoritative assessments on information and predictions regarding climate change.

  “You have working groups covering the physical science of climate change, impact on the world, and mitigation. Now, that word ‘authoritative’ is the key. Everything about the way the panel operates is designed to reinforce that. Every time they produce a report you have a lead author for each section, but typically you’ll get hundreds of expert reviewers providing tens of thousands of comments. The rule of thumb is they only let through what there’s absolute consensus on. Especially when it comes to the Summary for Policymakers, which is the only bit anybody ever reads.”

  “Wow. It’s amazing anything gets through at all.”

  “That’s the point. The IPCC is ferociously conservative. You can criticize it for being too slow to respond to the evidence for climate change, for instance. But when it does speak the governments listen.”

  “So do you think they’ll accept any of Thandie’s data and conclusions?”

  “Maybe the data. Less so the conclusions. There’s bound to be a debate. Even those who accept the reality of the sea-level rise see it as a symptom of climate change, and can’t accept any justification of it that doesn’t come from their old models—can’t accept it as something entirely new. A lot will depend on Thandie’s headline prediction, I think. Right now they’re clinging to eighty meters, tops, as an outer limit. I mean that would be catastrophic enough, but—”

  “Why eighty meters?”

  “Because that’s what you would get if all the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica were to melt. And the melting ice is the only source generally accepted for the ocean rise.”

  Lily nodded. “So it’s going to be hard for them to listen if Thandie tells them otherwise.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what do you think is going to come out of today?”

  “Nothing, immediately. It will take them months to come up with a report. Even then the governments probably won’t accept it, until the oceans are lapping around their feet. However other players will be listening hard.” He glanced down at the lecture theater. “I could point to five of those clown-haired characters down there who are in the pocket of members of the LaRei.”


  “The LaRei?”

  He grinned. “An exclusive Manhattan society. Even more exclusive than the MetCircle. You need a net worth of a hundred million bucks just to get in the door. The rich are listening, believe me.”

  She nodded. “And the rich will take care of themselves.”

  He eyed her. “Rich arseholes like me, you mean?”

  That made her uncomfortable. This man was, after all, her boss. “Nathan—”

  “Oh, don’t worry. Look, I know what you think of me, even though I saved your lives. In a supposedly capitalist society everybody despises the accumulation of wealth, save those who have it. Listen. Damn right I’m intending to act. I’m not going to wait around until the governments get over their collective denial, as Dr. Jones puts it. Damn right I’m intending to save myself, and my son Hammond, if I can—and save my wealth, whatever that means in the coming world. Who wouldn’t? But remember this: I sponsored Thandie’s survey, I recruited the arseholes she needed from Woods Hole and wherever else. I’m even sponsoring this meeting today. What more can I do than that?”

  Lily said nothing. She didn’t believe he was after her approval, as such, or her praise. With Nathan it was all about dominance. But Nathan was no monster just because he had made himself rich. She could see his foresight in operation, as he steadily converted his wealth into more tangible assets, land and equipment and people. And if Thandie’s projections about the speed of events in the years to come were correct, the world might need figures like Nathan, with the decisiveness and resources to make things happen fast.

  Gary Boyle hurried in, a laptop under his arm. “Hi,” he whispered to Lily, settling beside her. “I’m not late, am I?”

  “Just in time. How’s Aaron?”

  He opened the laptop, and showed her an image taken from a camera on the roof. The sky was dominated by an immense swirl of cloud. “Windspeed rising. Pressure dropping. They’ve flown in a HIRT. That’s a Hurricane Intercept Research Team, running around in speedboats and SUVs with weather instruments and laptops. And they’ve sent up a plane to drop a meteorology sonde into the eye. But they still don’t think Aaron’s going to make landfall.”