Flood

by Stephen Baxter

  “To begin with, the glaciers are vanishing in the Andes . . .”

  Even as the seas rose, global warming was increasing faster than ever. An immediate consequence was that cities along the Pacific coast of South America that relied on glacier runoff for their drinking water were running dry as the glaciers vanished. Others too, in similar locations in North America and the foothills of the Himalayas, were going thirsty.

  Meanwhile on South America’s east coast, Thandie said, there had been a major sea incursion at the broad mouth of Rio de la Plata. Coastal cities like Montevideo and Buenos Aires had long been drowned, but now the sea was pushing hundreds of kilometers northwards, flooding the lowlands of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. An even more dramatic incursion had forced its way into the mouths of the Amazon and back along the river valley, creating a giant inland sea. “Even where it isn’t drowned the rainforest is dying back,” Thandie said. “Just rotting away.”

  “And so becoming another source of carbon dioxide, rather than our greatest land reservoir of carbon, as it should be,” Elena said. Her special-ism was global ecological cycles. “More greenhouse.”

  “Yep,” said Thandie. “Every little helps.”

  And of course, Gary thought, ahead of each of these clinically mapped incursions a desperate crowd of refugees would be driven headlong, and behind it cities and towns would be left drowned and littered with corpses. Such things no longer needed saying.

  Thandie said that after spending some time with Lily in Peru they had traveled together to the US, where they had tried to push on the search for Grace. But the federal government was in the middle of a major relocation from flooded-out DC to Denver, Colorado, the highest state capital. And there Thandie had formed an impression of what was becoming of North America.

  Florida and Louisiana were all but gone now, nothing left but salvage crews working over the flooded ruins of the cities. The great plains of the eastern half of the continent were rapidly being inundated, and throughout the eastern states immense bands of refugees washed west. A major community was coalescing in the Appalachians, the highest point between the east coast and the Rockies and still above the floodwaters. America’s single greatest problem was a savage drought, which was affecting much of the agricultural heartland. Meanwhile both coasts were battered by a plague of hurricanes, more of them and more intense every year, giant storms feeding off ocean heat that raged over the ruins of the abandoned coastal cities.

  But there was also a gathering refugee crisis in Canada, as Hudson Bay spread inexorably wider, and the sea forced its way down the throat of the Saint Lawrence valley toward the Great Lakes, drowning Quebec and Montreal and Toronto. Elena said there was another extinction event going on there. The Lakes were the largest bodies of fresh water on Earth; now their ecologies were poisoned by salt.

  When it was Elena’s turn, she began, “I myself have seen much of Europe in my travels . . .”

  The plight of northern Europe was in fact the big story of the year. The inundation of Holland had been the beginning of a drastic flooding episode that now extended across the north European plain, through north Germany and into Poland. An immense population was in flight, heading either north to Scandinavia or south toward the Latin countries, a program of evacuation still more or less controlled by the European Union, though national rivalries were reemerging. But the south had problems of its own, with an intense drought locked down from Spain to the Levant. Meanwhile isostatic shifts were sparking off earthquakes and volcanism across the Mediterranean region. In the Middle East a major war was brewing between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the proximate cause being audacious attempts by Syria and others to get their hands on the Israelis’ advanced desalination technology.

  They spoke in broad-brush terms of other areas none of them had witnessed in person recently, relaying secondhand accounts. Gary repeated Sanjay’s description of Australia.

  In the Indian subcontinent, the misery of flooding and war in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh had been augmented by years of monsoons that failed or mistimed because of shifts in the global ocean circulation system. In southeast Asia there was great suffering. In Vietnam there had been a tremendous evacuation from a drowning Ho Chi Minh City to the highlands of the north. Cambodia and Thailand were mostly gone. North and South Korea had abandoned their fratricidal struggle and opened their common border, the better to manage the flows of refugees caused by the rising of the Yellow Sea. In China, that same rise had caused the abandonment of Beijing, and a huge wash of refugees into Inner Mongolia and beyond.

  Much of Africa was gripped by drought, while the Rift Valley was flooding. The rainforests of the Congo were dying back too, and Gary had heard of heroic efforts to save the last colonies of African great apes.

  “And in Russia,” Elena said, “all across the roof of the planet, the taiga is burning, the world forest.”

  “Great,” said Thandie. “More cee-oh-two.”

  Elena said, “A number of us are as concerned about the warming as about the flooding.”

  Thandie managed to laugh. “I love your Russian understatement. Yes, quite a number of us are concerned about that. More sources of cee-oh-two, less available sinks as the land drowns with its forests and marshes. Even in the sea we’re not getting any breaks. Higher temperatures reduce the productivity of the phytoplankton, so they can’t draw down as much of the cee-oh-two as they used to. Oh, and as the sea spreads at the expense of land and ice, the planet’s albedo is reduced.” The flooded world was getting darker. So it reflected less light, absorbed more of the sun’s heat energy, and got even hotter.

  “And so it goes,” Gary said. “A whole interlocking set of feedback cycles, all of them set to ‘positive.’ ”

  “Yeah,” Thandie said. “In fact I think we’ve reached a crucial point where the climate changes driven by the sea rise itself are starting to kick in major league.”

  “So what next? You think your sea-level rise is going to keep on coming?”

  “In the longer term,” Thandie murmured. “But short term we’re going to see a pulse, an artifact of ice cap melting . . .”

  The sea rise and the accompanied warming had together been enough to destabilize both the Greenland and Antarctic caps. The West Antarctic ice sheet, floating on the ocean, was beginning to shatter as the water steadily rose and warmed. But the seaborne sheet acted as a dam which blocked the glaciers, rivers of ice running off the frozen continent. Now those glaciers rushed to the sea, calving into icebergs. It would not be long before the huge East Antarctic sheet, anchored firmly to its base of rock for twenty million years, would also begin to crumble.

  “So,” said Elena. “Floods. Earthquakes. Vast refugee flows, which in turn bring resource shortages, the spread of disease and conflicts. Shifting climatic zones which, among other things, change the ranges of mosquitoes and other infection vectors. Our planet is failing us, and our civilization is under immense strain.”

  “Nicely summarized,” Thandie said dryly. “You fucking Russians are a miserable bunch.”

  “We have a saying,” Elena said. “The first five hundred years are the worst. I fear I am getting cold. We should go and unpack for the night. And then we can share this desolate news all over again.” She clambered out of the water, her underwear sticking to her flesh.

  Thandie watched Elena, and she saw Gary watching her. Thandie stood up, stretching, and walked over to Gary. She really was quite beautiful, he thought, in an athletic, hunter-gatherer kind of way. She murmured, “You keep your observations to yourself.” But she grinned at him, not malicious. She walked on, showering him with droplets warmed by her body.

  As they dressed, Elena said she had negotiated with the dacha staff for an evening meal. “There will be local delicacies, beetroot soup, and trout served in walnut sauce. Do not be concerned about the fish. Only the deeper parts of the Black Sea are poisoned by industrial hydrogen sulphide . . .”

  43

  The party cro
ssed the Caucasus, heading north and east, skirting the foothills of the southern mountains. Then they descended toward the shore of the Caspian Sea, traveling over a steppe of sandy clay until they reached the lower valley of the Volga.

  They lodged for a day at Astrakhan. Close to the border with Kazakhstan, this was a coastal town that sprawled across the delta of the Volga, spanning eleven islands. The Caspian Sea, cut off from the global ocean, had not yet risen, and the lands around its shore had not yet suffered the flooding experienced elsewhere. It was strange for Gary and the others to run around town and to see the cathedral, the city’s kremlin, the bridges, all eerily intact, as if nothing in the world had changed. But the city was all but drained of its people, and they saw more soldiers than civilians. The Russian authorities knew the oceanic transgression was coming, and had taken what precautions they could.

  The party split up here to provide distributed viewpoints to observe the incursion. Some of them, including Sanjay and Elena, stayed in Astrakhan. The rest broke into pairs or threes and spread out away from Astrakhan up the river valley or around the northern shore of the Caspian, where some thousand square kilometers of the coastal land was below the old sea level, a great band of lowland that stretched right around the ocean shore and spread maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers inland.

  Gary was paired with Thandie. They set up camp at the shore, close to a sandy, deserted beach. There they waited for the expected breakthrough.

  Days passed. The weather was good, and they swam in the landlocked ocean, but it was foul with industrial waste and oil. In fact they could see drilling rigs out on the water, gaunt shapes like floating factories. They worked. They had their laptops and satellite connections, and they spoke to their colleagues, spread around the shore of the sea and in the river valley. They held a number of virtual “hearths,” where the scattered researchers sent each other webcam images of their campfires.

  After a couple of days they were joined on the shore by more observers, in tents and mobile homes. Few spoke English; none seemed to be scientists. “Disaster tourists,” Thandie said dismissively.

  “Like us,” Gary pointed out.

  At night they discussed their lives, Gary’s captivity, Thandie’s ambitions, their shared memories, their mutual friends. And after a couple of days, in the dark of their tent as they tried to sleep, Gary dared raise the subject of Elena Artemova, and the swim at Krasnaya Polyana.

  “I swing both ways, if you want to know,” Thandie said. “But I don’t swing for you. Sorry.”

  “That’s OK,” he said calmly. “There’s something about Elena, though, isn’t there?”

  Thandie snorted. “What, her chest?”

  “No. That sadness you see in her. She reminds me of Piers Michaelmas, on his dark days. I want to make her smile. Does that sound dumb?”

  “No,” Thandie said. “Since I feel the same way.”

  “Good,” Gary said. “I mean it.” He thought of her lost baby, and felt warm. “If you can find happiness with Elena—”

  “Shut up, Boyle.”

  “Roger that.”

  So they drifted to sleep, both thinking of Elena, who for all Gary knew might be thinking of both of them, or neither.

  On the fourth morning they woke to a distant roar. When they climbed out of their tent the rubberneckers were already standing by the shore, binoculars in their hands.

  Sanjay made an excited webcam communication; he had to shout over a noise like a waterfall. “It’s broken through! We let you sleep, we thought you’d like to discover the sound for yourselves. It was a storm in the Black Sea that did it . . .” The rising waters of the Black Sea, fed from the global ocean via the Mediterranean and the Sea of Marmara, had at last broken through the Caucasus barrier at its weakest point, forcing their way up the valley of the Don, flooding Volgograd, and then pouring down the Volga valley to Astrakhan. “The whole damn town’s already inundated. It’s extraordinary!”

  The distant rumble continued, like a far-off war.

  Thandie checked her data feeds. “The Black Sea had risen to around fifty meters above the old datum when it broke through the Caucasus. Whereas the Caspian was about twenty-seven meters below the datum. That’s about seventy-seven meters of head. No wonder it’s so damn loud.”

  “We’ve work to do.”

  “Yeah. But let’s go see first.” On impulse she grabbed his hand. They walked down to the edge of the sea.

  All along the littoral the grubby water was advancing slowly, like a tide coming in, surging a little when a wave broke. They paced back before it, counting, timing their steps.

  “At this rate it’s going to amount to a half-kilometer advance per day,” Thandie said. She pulled a handheld from her pocket and did some quick figuring. “A vertical rise of maybe ten centimeters a day.”

  “It’s going to take a while to fill up to the global datum, then,” Gary said. “A year?”

  “More.”

  The tourists were baffled. They seemed to have expected a giant wave you could surf on. Well, if you wanted spectacle you should be in the Volga valley, Gary thought. But he had a scientist’s imagination, the capacity to understand the numbers. “The Caspian is a thousand kilometers long. A sea that could swallow Japan. And it’s filling like a bathtub. Think of the volumes that must be pouring down the Volga.” And, Gary thought, it was just going to keep on pushing back and back, eating away at the land.

  They stood there and let the rising water wash over their bare feet. Thandie said, “Nobody’s seen a sight like this since the Ice Age. Do you think we’re privileged or cursed?”

  “Both, maybe.”

  “Listen, Gary. What’s next for you?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “More of this.” She waved a hand. “We’re going to see a re-creation of giant bodies of water that haven’t stood on the Earth since the last glaciation, when meltwater filled every hollow: the lost great lakes. From here the sea will eventually extend all the way north to the Arctic coast. In Africa, the ocean will force its way up the Niger and the Nile to re-form Lake Megachad, a sea the size of western Europe. And in North America Lake Agassiz will form again, a huge inland sea that stretched from Saskatchewan to Ontario, from the Dakotas to Minnesota. Sights not seen for five hundred human generations. Let’s go see . . . Why, there’s even good science to be done. Even if nobody will ever buy my book about it.”

  But he had already decided what he should do. He could keep working wherever he went: in the midst of a global transformation there was data to be gathered everywhere. He would still be part of the worldwide community of watchers. But he’d decided. He would go back to America. His mother had died and he had no immediate family there. But he thought he would see if he could help Lily find Helen’s baby. At heart, he was discovering, he was drawn to people, not spectacle.

  Twenty-seven years old, he wanted to go home. He tried to explain this. Thandie didn’t press him.

  The sea continued to advance, rising, until it soaked the cuffs of their trousers. A rubbernecker a dozen meters away glared in disappointment. “Is this all there is to it? What a bust.”

  44

  February 2020

  From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

  When he joined up in Omaha, Bennie Thornton didn’t know much about the purpose of the crusade. As far as he was concerned it was a holy war, a chance to earn some grace by sticking one to the Muslims, a last chance before the world finally went to hell.

  In fact, he learned during his orientation and training, the war in Jerusalem was all part of a grand scheme designed by a group of American Christian fundamentalists called the Third Templars—a project intended to bring about the apocalypse.

  A little Googling showed Kristie that the religious response to the flood had been complex and multifaceted, even just within Christianity. How should a Christian act in these extraordinary times? Some commentators cited Bible passages that supported an argument that the devout shou
ld concentrate their efforts on ensuring that they and others were among those saved. And adherents of the modern “prosperity gospel,” who believed that God rewarded faith with wealth and material success, argued that the time to use that God-given wealth was right now, to buy up the high lands and let the less worthy drown. But the US National Association of Evangelicals led calls for the government to take various actions regarding the flood and its effects, just as it had once led calls to act over climate change, actions it claimed were entirely consistent with Christianity.

  Gradually an ecumenical campaign by Catholic and Protestant leaders won traction, arguing that selfish actions conflicted with basic Christian teachings of self-denial, humility and charity. They pointed to Christ’s expression of the Golden Rule: “And as you would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise” (Luke 6:31). That was surely a mandate to help those afflicted by the flood, which was disproportionately affecting those of limited means, like the poor inhabitants of shantytowns and river deltas. Leaders of other great religions developed similar arguments.

  It seemed to Kristie that the religions were in general doing a great deal to harness ethical and material backing for the vast relief efforts being mobilized around the world, and indeed to temper the thrust of some of those efforts, as some of the super-rich and the consultancies and multinationals continued to try to use flood emergencies as opportunities to extract profits and colonize fresh economic territory.

  But the Third Templars had a more specific cause.

  They claimed that, according to Revelation and other sources, the building of a Third Temple on the Mount in Jerusalem was a necessary prerequisite to clear the way for the coming of Christ, and put an end to this age of turmoil and disaster. So that was what they set out to do. They were joined in this purpose by a gang of Messianic Zionists.

  Unfortunately the erection of the Third Temple required demolishing various Islamic monuments in place on the same site. So the mission had immediately sparked a war that involved all three of the monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The war of Abraham, they called it.