Flood

by Stephen Baxter

  Sanjay made his way aft. Laden with a bulging backpack, Sanjay was sweating from the heat of the day, and he wore a thin linen mask over his bearded mouth to keep out the smoke from the Istanbul fires. He dumped his bag with relief, and accepted a flask of cold water from Gary. He lifted his mask and took a deep slug of water; then he poured the rest over his head and face. “Do you mind?”

  “The ship’s got its own desalination plant,” Gary said. “Fill your boots.”

  “Thanks.”

  It was time to leave. A boatswain lined up cast-off hawsers into neat parallel rows. Gary could see the captain on the bridge, standing alongside the Turkish pilot who would navigate the boat through the strait. The whole boat shuddered as the twin screws churned the waters of the Golden Horn. Some of the scientists came up from the main laboratory below decks to see the sights. Mostly young, mostly weather-beaten and shabby, they milled around the deck, peering at the murky water, the walls of the channel. But this was a working cruise, and in the small compartment above the bridge, which they called the top lab, a couple of researchers were already booting up the echo-sounding gear.

  Sanjay leaned on the rail and looked out at the skyline of Istanbul, gliding slowly past the ship. Despite the flooding, despite the quakes, it was still a stunning sight. Eighteen months after the initial quakes the stubbornly unbroken dome of the Hagia Sophia had become an iconic image for a stressed world, and the low morning sun glinted from the minarets and gilded domes of the mosques that crowded the old city. But smoke rose up in lazy towers from the burning districts, and choppers flapped through the murk.

  Gary was glad to see Sanjay, who was one of a loose network of climatologists and oceanographers Gary had kept bumping into in the last couple of years, as they traveled the planet monitoring its extraordinary changes. But he’d thought Sanjay had missed his chance today. “You cut it fine, don’t you?”

  Sanjay shrugged. “You know what travel is like nowadays.”

  “Yeah. Well, there are plenty of spare berths. I’d guess only about half the promised attendees turned up, despite all Woods Hole could do.”

  “But Thandie Jones is here?”

  Gary grinned. “You couldn’t keep her away.”

  “This is a Woods Hole ship, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Gary kicked a rusty deck plate. “Used to be a salvage ship during the Second World War. Shivers like a drying-out drunk. But I figure if she hasn’t sunk in eighty years, she’s not gonna sink under me now.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  One by one the scientists drifted off to begin work. Gary’s laptop beeped for his attention, as data came in from the various teams aboard the vessel.

  The narrow Bosporus strait was the only connection between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, which in turn linked to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles, and then the Med kissed the Atlantic at Gibraltar. So the Bosporus was the only way the rising global ocean could reach the Black Sea.

  For millennia the Black Sea had been a freshwater ocean, fed by several major rivers and draining out into the Marmara. But under the Bosporus’s freshwater outflow there had always been a deep countering saltwater current going north, from Marmara into the Black Sea. Since antiquity navigators had made use of this; you could lower a basket full of stones into the deep water and have yourself pulled against the surface current. The saltwater flow was a relic of the post-Ice Age surge which had seen a dammed and half-dried-up Black Sea refilled catastrophically from the rising Marmara. Now the oceans were rising again, and that subsurface salt current was much stronger than it had been. Gary supposed that eventually it would overwhelm the surface flow altogether, and the Bosporus would become a saltwater aqueduct, filling up the Black Sea basin.

  From there, however, from the Black Sea, the rising ocean water had nowhere to go—not for now. An anticipated change in this situation was the primary motive for this expedition.

  Another alarm chimed on Gary’s laptop. Time for him to go to work himself. He began to unreel the instrument chain, dropping it into the water; it would trail the boat’s starboard flank, thus staying well away from the screws.

  Sanjay inspected the instrument reel. It was a cable of chain links, with more than a hundred thermometers attached along its length. “For measuring the temperature variations across the thermocline?”

  “You got it. The Bosporus has to be one of the most intensely studied waterways in the world. And yet so much has changed, we know scarcely anything about its condition now. Every time you make a measurement it’s a discovery . . . So where have you come from?”

  “Australia.”

  “How are they faring there?”

  Sanjay shrugged, his expression hidden by his face mask. “The sea is covering the coasts, of course. The inhabitants of the great cities, especially on the east coast from Melbourne up to Brisbane, are fleeing inland. Tent cities on the Great Dividing Range. But the most interesting event has been the sea’s forcing its way inland from the southeast, up the Spencer and Saint Vincent gulfs. The Murray River Basin is pretty much drowned, and the sea has broken through to a lake, called Lake Eyre, which was actually below the old sea level.”

  “So Australia has had its own refilling episode.”

  “Refugees from Bondi Beach tried to surf the incoming waves. Fools.” Sanjay laughed. “Elsewhere it is as you would expect. Dry places become dryer, wet places wetter. To a first approximation agriculture has ended in Australia. Now they rely entirely on imported food, such as they can get, and the rationing is ferocious. But the native Australians have gone.”

  “The Aborigines? What do you mean, gone?”

  “They always remembered how to live in the continent’s red heart. Now they are leaving the white folk to their drowning cities.”

  Gary put the question that every climatologist kept asking. “And if the sea keeps rising?”

  Sanjay shrugged again. “Then the Aborigines are fucked. But so are we all, in the end.”

  The ship had reached the narrows between the steep bluffs of Kandilli and Kanlica, which still stood high above the water.

  Gary asked, “So what keeps you going, Sanj? How are your family? Your kids?”

  “They and their mothers are with my sister, Narinder, and her own family. They are in a village in the Scottish Highlands, not far from Fort William. Safe up there. But they may have to move. After the tsunami the central British government all but collapsed, and is capable of organizing nothing but evacuations and emergency relief. In the highlands the old clans are forming again! Our father left us a family tree he mapped back to before the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie. So we have allegiances.”

  “You’re not tempted to join them?”

  “Maybe eventually, if things get bad enough. For now the science keeps me occupied. We must continue. What else is there to do?” Sanjay glanced at the sky, which was all but clear of smog. He slipped off his mask and sniffed the air.

  42

  Having passed through the strait, the Links tracked the coast of the Black Sea to the eastern shore. She landed close to the border between Russia and Georgia, over a drowned seaside resort called Sochi.

  There was no functioning harbor here. Shallow-draft boats had to shuttle the scientists to a kind of pier that had been improvised on a main north-south road called the Kurortny Prospekt. There was nobody to help them disembark save the ship’s crew, and they had to haul their own luggage and equipment. But there were trucks waiting, hired by Woods Hole. Gary wondered how much the fuel had cost the distant bursars of Woods Hole.

  Much of the town of Sochi, where it survived above the waterline, seemed abandoned, the shops and bars closed up or burned out, and there were few people about. A Russian girl called Elena Artemova, seconded from the Shirshov Oceanology Institute in Moscow, pointed gloomily to the mountains that loomed over the coast. “Everybody sensible has gone to the high villages,” she said. “And so must we, for the night.”

  The trucks t
ook the scientists and their gear up into the mountains to a village called Krasnaya Polyana—once a favorite of President Putin, a leathery, tobacco-chewing driver somberly informed them. The drive was spectacular but somewhat scary, the road snaking along ledges cut into steep mountain gorges. As they climbed Gary could clearly see how the coastal resorts had been flooded, their beaches drowned, and how the ocean had pushed deep into river valleys lined with conifers.

  This was the Caucasus, the fat peninsula that stretched across the south of the Russian Federation, bounded by the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to the west, and the Caspian Sea to the east. Gary had studied the local topography. It was varied country, with the north dominated by steppe and to the south mountains, until very recently still snow-capped. What was most interesting to the climatologists was that northern band of steppe, stretching from Rostov to Groznyy, much of it a meadow carpeted with wild flowers and rush-filled river valleys. This was the lowest stretch of this neck of land that separated the Black Sea from the landlocked Caspian. And when the rising Black Sea broke its bounds, across the steppe was the way the water would flow.

  At Krasnaya Polyana they were taken to what had once apparently been quite a grand dacha, a scatter of single-story buildings under a canopy of spruce. The trucks parked for the night, and the drivers disappeared to their own dwellings in the main village. The scientists explored the dacha, calling to each other. The only tall building was a grand limestone block covered with stucco and peeling paint. The long entrance hall had a decorated ceiling, the images obscured by damp, and iron spiral stairs led to rooms off the upper balconies.

  There were staff here, locals, mostly elderly, who spoke no English, and Elena Artemova and other Russian-speakers had to interpret. They seemed disappointed the scientists were so few, and that they would need little space. Elena seemed embarrassed to be drawn into negotiating over fees with an elderly woman.

  Sanjay said, “You wonder what use money is to people like this.”

  “Just as well this old crone hasn’t figured that out,” Thandie murmured. “While her sons have pissed off to the hills to grow corn and fight over the girls, she’s stayed on, accumulating a stash of rubles against the day things get back to normal. Good plan.”

  “Perhaps she has no choice,” Elena said harshly. “Did you think of that?” Aged twenty-eight, she was a gloomy woman, but beautiful. Her face was long, with pale, luminous skin, large eyes, a downturned mouth; she wore her hair pulled back, which emphasized the boniness of her forehead. “Perhaps her sons would not take her to “the hills.” Perhaps she cannot work up there. This is all she has. Each of us is under pressure in a changing world, Thandie Jones. And we don’t all have rich western institutions backing our adventures.”

  Thandie snorted. “Don’t give me that, Mother Russia. You’re taking the Woods Hole dollar just like the rest of us.”

  “If not for us and the ‘Woods Hole dollar,’ ” Sanjay said, “this old woman and those who work with her would go hungry. So everybody wins, yes? Let’s leave it like that.”

  Neither Thandie nor Elena was satisfied, but they had been rubbing each other up the wrong way since Istanbul. Their ongoing argument, oddly, brought out the stereotypes in both of them, Gary thought, the dour moralistic Russian versus the cut-the-crap American.

  Nobody chose to stay in the main house, though they would use its facilities, like the showers and laundry room. Instead the dozen of them settled for a cluster of the little single-story chalets under the shelter of the spruce trees. They were close enough together that in the shared yard outside they could build their evening hearth, an important ritual.

  Gary doubled up with Sanjay. Sanjay, exhausted from his traveling, dumped his rucksack, kicked off his boots, threw himself on a bunk, and slept. Some of the Americans, stiff from the drive, started an improvised game of softball in the shade of the pines.

  Gary went to find Thandie and, on a mischievous whim, Elena, and suggested exploring the village. The women eyed each other warily, but went along.

  Surrounded by forest-clad peaks, Krasnaya Polyana was a pretty place, and at six hundred meters above the old sea-level datum was much too high to have been touched by the floods. It was good to walk briskly, and to breathe in air unpolluted by smoke or sewage. Gary could see why Putin had liked it—a man with taste, he thought. In fact it was probably better for the casual traveler now that twenty-first-century tourism had receded, so long as you didn’t get shot by some Russian brand of survivalist.

  They found paths that led to an arboretum, and to the remains of a hunting lodge that had to predate Putin, and indeed modern Russia; maybe it belonged to the tsars. And beyond that they came to a river valley, where a threadlike waterfall tumbled into a plunge pool.

  Thandie glanced around. There was nobody in sight. “Fuck it.” She ran toward the water, whooping, stripping off her clothes as she ran. She hopped as she got her jeans off. She was naked by the time she got to the water, her brown body lithe and muscular, and she splashed into the pool.

  “Watch your feet on the rocks!” Elena called after her. “And the water will be cold—”

  “Elena.” Gary touched her arm. “Lighten up. Come on.” He unzipped his own coverall.

  “Very well. But no peeking.”

  Gary stripped bare. Elena kept her underwear on, sensible stuff, heavy pants and a kind of sports bra. She was bustier than she had looked with her blouse on.

  By now Thandie was splashing about under the waterfall. Her crisp hair sparkled with water droplets. The water was cold enough to make Gary hop and squeal as he went in centimeter by centimeter. Thandie kicked spray at him. “You classic wimp.”

  “Oh, shut up. Christ, Thandie, you must have rubber skin.”

  Elena slid uncomplaining into the water. It was just about deep enough to swim, to float your body off the rocks. Elena took a few solemn breaststrokes, her unsmiling face staring straight ahead.

  The three of them gathered in a circle. Once you got used to the water the cold wasn’t so bad, and the contrast with the warmth of the air was refreshing. Gary did his best to keep his eyes away from Thandie’s bare body, and from Elena, whose underwear, soaked, didn’t conceal much.

  As for the women, Gary knew he was no hunk, but he had thought they’d peek. But they seemed to be working harder at not looking at each other than not looking at him. Aha, he thought. Maybe that was why there was so much tension between them.

  Elena said to Gary, “I suppose you must have dreamed of places like this, during your captivity.”

  “You bet.”

  “Forgive me for asking. I have known you for some time, but I do not know you well. We have not spoken of your captivity before.”

  “That’s OK. Most people are embarrassed to mention it, I think.”

  “How long were you kept?”

  “In all, three years.”

  “I am shocked.”

  “The others got me through. The worst times weren’t the rough stuff, the humiliations and the beatings. Or a habit they had in one of our holding centers where they would throw us our food and make us scrabble for it, like apes. The worst time was when I was kept alone.”

  Elena nodded. “We are social creatures. We are defined by our relationships with others. Without that—”

  “We’re nothing.” He splashed water into his face. “I always knew there were good times like this ahead of me. That kept me going.”

  Thandie said, “But there are no more good times for Helen Gray.”

  “No. Poor Helen. I don’t suppose Lily has made any progress in finding out what became of her kid?”

  “No. Though the child is still supposed to be in the continental US somewhere. Lily thinks she’s become a pawn in the latest complicated diplomatic games regarding the various factions in Saudi, and what’s going to become of their oil. Lily’s sticking at it. Actually I got to see Lily when I was sent to South America. She’s mostly working with AxysCorp in Peru. Something call
ed Project City.”

  “What the hell’s that?”

  Thandie shrugged. “Who knows? Just another dumb idea of Nathan Lammockson’s.”

  Elena turned to her. “You were in South America recently? How are things there?”

  Gary said, “Maybe we should wait for the hearth . . .”

  As the global flood event unfolded, the international band of climatologists, oceanographers, geologists, seismologists, hurricane-chasers and ecologists who traveled the globe gathering data and cooking up hypotheses had formed a community of their own. There weren’t all that many of them to begin with, they were broadly of a similar age and from similar academic backgrounds, and they kept bumping into each other.

  With time the data-gathering and the face-to-face sharing of news added up to a kind of ongoing global workshop that came to seem increasingly important. The civilian population was too concerned with just getting through the challenges of the next twenty-four hours, and the governments with providing the essentials of life to a stressed population—and, perhaps, hanging onto their own power. It was only in the endless conversation of the itinerant scientists that a planetary consciousness of what was going on was maintained.

  And the ritual of the hearths had emerged as a central part of the process. On nights like this, when a group felt it was quorate, you would sit around a camp fire, real or metaphorical, to drink, smoke, shoot up, make out—and, most important of all, you talked your heart out about what you had seen. Generally the sessions were transcribed by speech recognition systems and uploaded to what was left of the worldwide web, to provide an expert oral history of the flood.

  But Thandie said, “Nah. When we do the hearth later, we can embellish. In the meantime I’m comfortable here.” She scissored her long legs in the crisp water. “You want to hear about South America or not?”

  “Shoot,” said Gary.