Flood

by Stephen Baxter

  It had quickly widened out to a regional conflict involving other issues, battles over high land and water and desalination technology. The Israeli state had been a pioneer in weapons and security technology since 9/11 and before, and fought back viciously against any threat. And the Palestinians in their walled-off enclaves were making one last attempt to win back the land they believed had been stolen from them. There had been many wars fought over Jerusalem, Bennie learned, all the way back to the ancient Romans and probably beyond. But this, one way or another, was likely to be the last.

  All Bennie cared about was getting into the fight. Aged nineteen, his body a mass of muscle and testosterone, he whooped as he jumped out of the plane to make his first parachute descent into the burning city.

  45

  June 2020

  The AxysCorp chopper skimmed over the oily waters of Upper New York Bay, heading northeast toward Manhattan. The pilot banked the bird, and pointed out the Statue of Liberty. “Everybody wants to see the old lady,” he called back.

  Lily leaned against Plexiglas. The day was dull, the sky a solid mass of slate cloud from which rain fell steadily, rattling on the bird’s hull. The gray of the sky was reflected in the gray of the sea, gray over gray.

  And there was Liberty, tilted over by Hurricane Aaron two years ago but still standing on her submerged pedestal, surrounded by a turbulent sea. Lily didn’t imagine the grand old statue could keep standing much longer; one good storm would probably do the trick. But, according to Thandie Jones, the statue herself would survive indefinitely, submerged and buried in sediment. Even when the green patina on the lady’s copper sheeting thickened and turned to stone, her sculptor’s design would still be visible to whatever strange undersea visitors she might receive.

  As the flooded cityscape glided beneath the chopper’s prow, Lily used Liberty as a reference point to get her bearings, trying to see how much had changed since she last flew in here over two years ago for Thandie’s science presentation. There was no sign of the barriers and levees hastily thrown up in those early panicky months; they were covered by the water. There was Brooklyn to her right and Jersey City to her left, the ground now entirely submerged, and only a few tall buildings protruded above the water. Grand-looking vessels lay at anchor around the shallow coasts, some the metallic gray of navy ships, but also yachts, brilliant white, floating like toys in a bathtub. The last refuge of New York’s super-rich, perhaps, lying at anchor above the wrecked city. And Manhattan was a reef, directly ahead of her, the tallest buildings thrusting out of the water like splinters of quartz.

  The chopper ducked down into the Financial District, sweeping between the shoulders of battered, burned-out skyscrapers. It was like flying through a virtual-reality version of some great canyon system, simplified rectangular blocks and straight-line cliffs with the water lying in the rectilinear valleys below. The glassless windows of the buildings were dark, but there was activity on the water: powerboats raising wakes that lapped against the stained walls, and heavier, lumbering rafts. The water itself was littered with garbage, plastic scraps and bursting bin liners.

  “Heading up Broadway,” the pilot called. “I’ll be setting you down at Union Square, or over it. Broadway and 14th Street. You know it?”

  “I think so,” Lily said, dredging up memories of tourist excursions. “Was there a farmers’ market?”

  “Yeah. Nice place, if kind of run down. That was how it was, anyhow.”

  His voice was crisp in her headset. He had a New York accent but of a cultured sort; evidently he was a native. Lily wondered what he had done for a living before the flood, before he had come to do what everybody seemed to do nowadays, which was work for Nathan Lammockson. She asked, “You’re a New Yorker yourself?”

  “I am, ma’am. Grew up in Gramercy, in fact. Nice place to live. My mother, she’s still alive, she’s been moved out to the Catskills. She’s talking about going to stay with her brother in his hunting lodge in West Virginia, up in the Appalachians. That’s pretty high, you know.”

  “That sounds like a good plan.”

  “Yeah, but AxysCorp says the hills are already full of woodsmen and survivalist types. You know, the kind of guys who loaded their pickups and set off as soon as the first raindrops started to fall. Mr. Lammockson says there have been more casualties in the US inflicted by gunshot wounds at illegal roadblocks than by the weather events themselves.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  And she wasn’t surprised to hear him quote Lammockson. As the global crisis had intensified Nathan Lammockson had taken to broadcasting regular speeches to his worldwide network of employees and business partners, a mix of pep talk, hard news and his peculiarly British homespun-capitalist philosophy. In an increasingly fragmented world it was as if Nathan Lammockson was left standing like the Statue of Liberty herself, alone but still bearing the torch of hope.

  “So,” she said, “are you going to join your mother in the hills?”

  The pilot snorted. He seemed surprised she’d asked. “No, ma’am. I’ll be staying as close to Mr. Lammockson as I can. Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

  46

  In the diffuse shadow of the Con Ed building’s clock tower a giant raft drifted over Union Square.

  The raft must have been a hundred meters long. Its core was a slab, black as tarmac, bordered by barbed wire and with giant Stars and Stripes dangling limp and wet at its corners. There were shacks on its back, built of ply or plastic or corrugated iron and lashed down by ropes and cables. One of the shacks, a bit grander than the rest, rose to a couple of stories, glass-walled like a lookout tower. People seemed to be working all over the raft, hauling stuff back and forth from tarpaulined heaps of materials. Boats docked with the raft, everything from canoes and rowboats to sleek-looking launches in AxysCorp livery. The raft even had a helipad, marked by a big H splashed crudely in white paint.

  The chopper ducked down to an easy landing on the H. Lily saw they were being watched all the way down from a kind of bunker of sandbags set up on the raft, with a slit window from which glass lenses glinted.

  Lily stepped out into driving rain. It bounced off the surface of the raft, which was, she saw now, a quilt of ply and plastic tarps, roughened up to give firm footing. The raft bobbed massively, and the vertical lines of the buildings around her dipped and swayed. She pulled her poncho tight around her body, and shook her hood forward to keep the rain off her face; the rainwater tasted salty where it dribbled into her mouth. There was a stink of sewage, and something else, something more profound, corrupt.

  She could hear the hissing of the rain on the floor, the calls of the people, even the cries of the gulls. They were sea-coast noises, she thought. Other than that the city was astonishingly quiet. But then Manhattan’s traffic, the private cars and buses and flocks of yellow cabs, lay rusting meters beneath her feet.

  Nathan Lammockson strode forward, here in person to meet her off the chopper, bulky and purposeful in a waterproof coverall. He was shadowed by an aide who made continual notes on a handheld. Lammockson shook the pilot’s hand. “Bobby. Neat landing. Remember me to your mother.”

  The pilot grinned, pleased and flattered. “Thanks, Mr. Lammockson.”

  Lammockson embraced Lily. “Good to see you again. Let’s get you out of this fucking rain.” He led her toward the two-story building.

  She glanced back at the pilot. “Look at that guy. You’ve made his day.”

  “The old tricks are always the best. I knew Tony Blair. Did I ever tell you that? I learned at the feet of the master.”

  The tower turned out to be a kind of two-level apartment, with a kitchen and storage area down below, and an open-plan lounge-diner-bedroom up top. It was small and basic, but furnished exquisitely. The white-leather armchairs had evidently been salvaged from Bloomingdale’s, for a store tag sat like a trophy on a little coffee table. It must have taken one hell of an operation to retrieve these beasts from under the water witho
ut so much as a single mark; salvage was already hugely difficult in a city in which all but the tallest buildings were now entirely submerged.

  Lammockson helped her out of her poncho, while he warmed up some coffee. “Welcome to my humble,” he said. “Hey, you want something stronger than that? I have some Jack Daniel’s that needs finishing.” He showed her the bottle.

  “No, thanks. Quite a place you have here.”

  “Costs me an arm and a leg in rent. The Collective claim to be a bunch of bohemians, but they’re as sharp as any Lower East Side slum landlord ever was.”

  “What Collective? I just assumed you owned the whole raft.”

  He laughed and handed her a coffee. He poured a slug of Jack Daniel’s into his own mug. “Hell, no. Cheaper to rent. Especially since, as you know, I’ve no intention of staying around longer than I need to. I still have some business here, supplying the remaining recovery and evacuation consultancies, but basically I moved out of New York after the hurricane.”

  For years Nathan had been steadily transferring his wealth into tangible forms, in power and land and other assets. As communications and transport links steadily broke down, the surviving financial institutions were under increasing pressure. Nathan always said he didn’t want his wealth to disappear when the power failed in some bank’s computer.

  “The Greenwich Village Collective built this raft, mostly from automobile tires and oil drums. Planned and assembled it right here after the hurricane blew out, even while the waters rose steadily around them. Only don’t call it a ‘raft.’ A raft is a kind of vessel, right? This raft isn’t meant to go anywhere, too damn big to navigate down the city streets. Think of it as an island. People live here; they ain’t just crew.” He pointed to low buildings. “That is a water filtration plant. And that’s a school. There are already kids in there who don’t remember the world before the flood.” He waved his mug at the flooded streets, the floating garbage, the cliffs of glassless windows around them. “To them, this is normal. Think of that! Time goes on.”

  “So how do people live?”

  “Scavenging. We’re floating above the carcass of the greatest city in the world. It will last for decades.”

  “I thought the federal government was in control of salvage rights.”

  Nathan raised his eyebrows. “Look around, Lily. The federal government’s in Denver. It doesn’t have a lot of control on the ground in a place like this.”

  “I see the Stars and Stripes flying everywhere.”

  “Oh, sure. The people here are still Americans. Who’s going to be the first to haul down Old Glory? But they’ve been looking to their own defense and provision for years already. The federal government doesn’t even collect taxes anymore, save from the likes of me who can’t get under their radar. It’s the same in Britain. The rump government in Leeds has no control over the ratty little salvagers who go scuba-diving in the Thames estuary.”

  Lily shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t had much news out of Britain since the tsunami, not since I got my sister and her kids out of there—thanks to you.”

  Lammockson nodded. “Where is Amanda?”

  “The AxysCorp compound in Iowa. I thought I’d join her there, and take her down to Project City with me.”

  “Fair enough. You don’t want to bring kids into a place like this, if you can help it. I mean there are hazards enough, the sewage. The other day, over on the east side, we found Freon bubbling up from an underwater mountain of rusting refrigerators, down on some dump. And every day you have the corpses bobbing up to the surface. The kids here earn a few Collective-scrip dollars by poking away the stiffs with boathooks. Five, ten years ago you would never have imagined you would live to see such scenes. And in another five years you won’t either, when the fishes have eaten the bodies of the urban dead.” He drank his coffee. “So what about your buddies? Piers Michaelmas is in the area, isn’t he?”

  “I heard a British chopper is bringing him in to Manhattan later today.” Much to her surprise, Piers had finally abandoned his British army commission and had “taken the Lammockson shilling,” as he put it, coming to work for AxysCorp, though he hadn’t yet committed to come to Project City.

  “And the scientist guy?”

  “Gary’s in the States too. He’s in Colorado, at the NOAA headquarters there.”

  He nodded. “Look, I’ll have Michaelmas brought here. You can use this apartment for the night. I have my yacht moored over at Coney Island, I’ll be fine there. You can conference-call Gary and whoever else you want. My staff will show you how.”

  “Thanks, Nathan.”

  “It’s not generosity, believe me, but calculated self-interest. I want you guys with me, you hostages, you who have already weathered a worse storm personally than any global-flooding shit is likely to unleash on us.

  “The world is changing, Lily. This is no longer an emergency, because it has no finite duration. We are entering a new phase in human history. Earth itself has intervened in human affairs, trying to shake us off as a dog shakes off a flea.” He was standing up straighter, apparently unconsciously, and his voice took on the sonorousness he adopted as he addressed his worldwide flock. Lily remembered Piers’s observation that Nathan was a man who actively sought a crisis commensurate with the stature he perceived in himself. “Listen. The average sea-level rise is already up somewhere between seventy and eighty meters, depending who you believe, and still accelerating, still following Thandie Jones’s exponential curves. And humanity is in flight. I’ve some satellite imagery I should show you, taken in the infrared. Whole refugee nations marching inland, dogged by thirst, famine, disease and brushfire wars. Before the flood, fully a third of the world’s population lived at elevations below a hundred meters. Well, we’re approaching that level of rise now, so there are two billion people who must be either dead already or on the move.

  “The governments have at last shed their denial about what’s happening, but it’s too late for them. They are losing control over their own resources and populations, just as they’re getting locked into a new kind of geopolitics. Suddenly altitude is a more valuable resource than oil. There are rumors that Russia and China are moving toward war over Tibet, for instance. Governments will soon become irrelevant. Governments will always be at a disadvantage because they have an obligation to deal with the whole population, to support it or suppress and control it, or whatever. Private organizations have much more limited goals—selfish goals if you will, but goals much more achievable by their very finitude. And so it’s the corporations, the big consultancies and the multinationals, that will stand when governments crumble and crack.”

  “And you mean to stand with them, Nathan?”

  “You can bet on it.” He reached for the Jack Daniel’s. “You sure you won’t have a slug of this? You’re not going anywhere else today. Relax. Take your boots off. The shower is hot. Come on, I’ll get you a glass.”

  47

  It was late in the day by the time Piers reached Union Square, and came to the raft. In Nathan’s apartment, he stood before the window and gazed out at the view while cradling a glass of Lammockson’s whiskey. He looked like he needed leave; his eyes were gray-rimmed, his stubble untidy.

  The clouds had broken up. Behind the battered shoulders of Manhattan’s surviving buildings the sunset towered into the sky in layers of pink and red, and the light shone in the oil pools on the surface of the waters.

  “Quite a sight,” Piers said. “Volcano sunsets, they say. All that dust in the air.”

  “Yes.” Lily hadn’t seen Piers for six months. She didn’t much want to talk about volcanoes.

  She tried to get a sense of him. He was the same Piers she had always known, the same mix of strength and fragility, of personal power and awkwardness. But he did seem a little more nervous than usual around her, however. As if there was something he wanted to say to her, but didn’t know how.

  “Piers, I’ll swear you were wearing that same shirt when
I last saw you in Newburgh.” It was an AxysCorp-durable garment, in fact, already years old. As other suppliers fell away, Nathan Lammockson was clothing the world.

  He shrugged. “It’s a while since I’ve been shopping,” he said with some of his old dryness. “Slowly but surely we’re all turning into scarecrows.”

  “Which will make no difference to my dress style at all.” That was Gary’s voice, crisped by the connection.

  They turned. Gary had appeared in the screen of the laptop Lily had set up on Nathan’s coffee table. The image fritzed a bit.

  Piers and Lily walked back from the window. Lily raised her Jack Daniel’s. “Hey, Gary, you have a drink there?”

  He reached out of the image and retrieved a cup of something steaming hot in a china mug. “Coffee. Only been passed through the perk about four times. And then there were three.”

  “Yes.”

  Piers raised his own glass. “To Helen, and John Foreshaw. Absent friends.”

  They drank together.

  Lily said, “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here today.”

  “Ha ha,” Gary said.

  “Well, we know why,” Piers said. “You want to persuade Gary here to sign up with Lammockson, and for us both to come to the Andes with you.”

  “Yep. I happen to think it’s the best option we have.”

  Gary said, “I have some unfinished business which has a bearing on that. We’ll get to it.” He looked past them. “Quite a sunset you have going on there.”

  They shifted so he could see out of the window. “New York City’s not as pretty as it looks,” Piers said. “People living like rats on a vast garbage dump.”