Flood

by Stephen Baxter

  “No. For sure there are going to be more wars like this one. More squabbling over scraps of high ground. We’re all going to have to choose where we make our stand.” She glanced around at the encamped city. “A group this size isn’t going to be viable much longer.”

  “I know that.”

  “You decided where you’ll go, you and Grace?”

  He eyed her. “Have you?”

  “West,” she said promptly. “West to Denver. The highest state capital, the capital of the federal government, the strongest enclave of high-technology civilization left anywhere in the world, probably. That’s the place to be, I figure.”

  “The place where any solution to all this is going to come from.”

  She pulled a face. “I don’t believe in ‘solutions’ anymore. I just want to be in a place where I can keep having hot showers for as long as possible. How about you?”

  He hesitated. “I’ve had bits of contact with Lily Brooke. We’ve an open invitation to join her in Nathan Lammockson’s fortress in the Andes.”

  “Project City.” She grinned.

  “Yeah. Look, I know there’s something screwy about Lammockson, but he’s a tough, resourceful guy who’s committed to protecting us, I mean our group of hostages. He’s stuck to that line for fifteen years now, and Lily and Piers are pretty close to him. I’m going to try to make it there, I think.”

  She frowned. “That means going south. Through Mexico, Panama . . .”

  “I don’t imagine it will be easy. But there are no easy choices, are there?”

  “That there aren’t. Come on, let’s help those two idiots fix the tent.”

  So they got the tent up. Gordo let Gary charge up his phone from a battery in the jeep. And an Army doctor came out to check Michael’s wound; he cleaned it up and replaced the stitches with a plastic adhesive, but told Grace she’d done a good job. Michael stayed unconscious through the whole thing.

  As the night drew in Gordo set up a camping stove, and they cooked chicken and pork and stir-fried vegetables, military supplies; it was better food than Gary had tasted for years.

  Grace came back with a girlfriend. They listened to music, by headphones plugged into a little power-free crystal radio set. The girls sang along with the song they were hearing: “ ‘I love you more than my phone / You’re my Angel, you’re my TV / I love you more than my phone . . .’ ”

  The Denver government broadcast music through the surviving network of satellites, but nobody was recording music anymore, and you heard nothing newer than fifteen or twenty years old. Gary missed it badly. Always a big music fan, when he’d come out of the Barcelona cellars he’d spent a lot of time catching up with the output of his favorite bands, and devouring the best of the new stuff. Now that was no longer possible. Gary wondered how much the girls understood of the lyrics they were repeating, the phrases that casually referred to a vanished world. But he envied them their discovery of stuff that was at least new to them.

  The girls started improvising dance moves, and the adults clapped along. Gordo produced more alcohol, wine this time, and Thandie and Elena accepted some. Even Gary relented. Grace took a sip, her first-ever alcohol so far as Gary knew, but pronounced it bitter.

  They talked on, drinking quietly, as the stars came out over the Plains. There was one mild eruption around midnight when Elena got to her feet, noisily accusing Gordo of putting his hand on her thigh. It turned out to be Thandie playing a malicious joke.

  Then they settled into their tents, Michael, Grace and Gary squeezing into the small orange dome they had carried in pieces on their backs for years, and Gordo and the women in the big, sturdy, bottle-green military tent he’d borrowed for the night.

  It was around three in the morning when Gary was woken by the crashing noise of low-flying aircraft.

  He scrambled out of the tent. Gordo and Thandie were already out, Gordo pulling up his pants, his head tilted up. The planes roared over, their lights like constellations in flight. Their noise was more than loud; it was oppressive, crushing.

  Gary yelled at Gordo, “Ours?”

  “Hell, no. That’s a Russian design, MiGs. Fucking Mormons.” He grabbed his jacket and started hauling down his tent.

  Gary faced Thandie, for one last moment. He said, “Denver, then.”

  She replied, “Project City. I’ll remember.”

  “Good luck—”

  He heard a boom, like a crash of thunder. He looked southeast, toward Lincoln. Fireballs blossomed in the night.

  “Shit,” said Gordo. He threw stuff in the back of the jeep and jumped behind the steering wheel. “So it’s come to this,” he said as he started the engine. “A civil war over a drowned interstate. You know, we should have been flying to Mars, right now, tonight. NASA had this schedule. I could have been on the flight, not too old yet . . .” He looked up at the stars and gunned the engine. “You two dykes getting in or what?”

  60

  May 2034

  From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

  The footage on the Toodlepip.com website was ambiguous. It was hard to be sure of the details or of the precise sequence of events, in a murky panorama of broken, slushy polar ice under a leaden sky, the blurred figures of the humans, the small, scrambling bear.

  The flood was causing an extinction spasm, an event that was gathering pace rapidly. All over the world animals were driven from vanishing habitats, or slaughtered when they came into competition with humans for the remaining high ground. Birds were more mobile, but their nesting and feeding habits were always fragile; birds had been suffering since the beginning of the event, when a teenage Kristie had noted plunges in the populations of blue tits and other garden birds. As climate zones shifted or were drowned, vegetation was forced to relocate or succumb; the changes came much more rapidly than the life cycle of most trees, and the forests which burned or drowned were not replaced. Even the microbial world was stirred up, a cause of the new plagues which afflicted mankind.

  Much of the dying was out of sight, however; coastal and shallow-water life was being erased all but invisibly, for example. Toodlepip.com’s unique selling point was that it gathered images at the very point of these extinctions: pictures of the last of a kind succumbing to the dark, transmitted painlessly to the site’s remaining subscribers in Green Zone enclaves around the world. Some of these images were unspectacular. It was hard for most people who weren’t actually ecologists themselves to grieve over the destruction of a coral reef. But cute mammals were always a different story.

  The polar bears had been the poster stars of the global warming crisis that had afflicted the planet long before the flood itself. Now, all around the Arctic ocean, every spring Toodlepip and other agencies watched anxiously, or eagerly, for the bears to emerge from hibernation, the crux point of the animals’ survival. If the sea ice melted the mother bears wouldn’t be able to get to the seal cubs whose meat they relied on after a winter’s hibernating. And if the mothers couldn’t feed, their babies starved, and that was that.

  The last wild bear of all, it was commonly agreed, was a wretched starveling cub, stained yellow by the urine of its dead mother. And since the zoos had long been abandoned as expensive luxuries, the last in the wild was likely the last in the whole world, and the bears would join the elephants and the tigers and many, many more species in their final refuge in gene banks and zygote arks.

  What wasn’t clear from the Toodlepip footage was whether the cub died of natural causes, or whether it had been shot by the Inuit hunter who had guided the camera team to this remote spot in the Canadian Arctic in the first place. Even that was a story, the last Inuit bringing down the last bear. There was so much chatter about the event that it broke into international news summaries.

  61

  June 2035

  The AxysCorp chopper descended from a turbulent sky. There was a pad ready for it on the Nazca raft, marked out by bright yellow paint on a cluttered surface that heaved and swelled gently. The bird
set down gingerly. Lily, watching from the raft, knew that the company pilots disliked having to bring their birds down on the town rafts, and you could see that reluctance in their flying.

  As soon as the engine died and the rotor blades slowed, Juan Villegas clambered down and ducked under the slowing blades, hauling a crate out after him. The pilot, insectile behind his sunglasses, stayed in the safety of the gleaming bubble of his cockpit; he didn’t even release his harness. Lily ran in, head down, and took hold of the crate with Juan. Villegas stumbled on the heaving surface. The crate wasn’t heavy, but it was bulky and awkward. Together they made their way to the edge of the helipad, two elderly people hauling luggage, Lily thought, over this rough, swelling surface of plastic tarps.

  “Thanks,” Villegas said with feeling. “I wasn’t expecting it to be so unsteady underfoot.”

  “You’re doing OK,” Lily said, and she meant it. He was fifty-seven now, only a couple of years younger than Lily herself. There was very little left of the sleek blackness that had once made his hair shine, and he wore an AxysCorp coverall as battered and patched as Lily’s own, rather than a sharp suit. But he was still a handsome devil, she thought with a rare pang of jealousy. “I mean, you’re here. A lot of Project City folk won’t set foot on the town rafts.”

  He nodded. “I know. Tell it to my pilot.” The raft heaved again, making the two of them stagger, and Lily almost dropped the crate. “The storm is coming,” Villegas said. He glanced to the west, toward the Pacific, uneasily. “We could see it from the chopper, a sheet of black cloud. The weather forecasts have predicted it for days. And when the surge comes, that will be the end of Nazca. You’re confident the raft will hold together?”

  “As confident as I can be. Maria’s hut is just over there—that’s Maria Ramos, the mayor. That’s the best place to leave this gear.”

  “I’m in your hands.”

  They pushed on.

  Lily had been involved in the construction of the raft, leading a team of AxysCorp engineers. The raft’s skeleton had been laid down in a great sprawl in the heart of the old town, the basic pontoons of tires and oil cans overlaid by girders scavenged from ruined properties, and then topped by plastic tarps and treated corrugated iron, anything nondegradable. Shacks and huts constructed of bits of garbage and tied down by guy ropes clustered over the raft’s broad back like frogs clinging to a log. A Red Cross flag fluttered over one larger building, the medical center, and a few more advanced structures towered, a transmitting mast, aerials, a wind turbine.

  When the project had begun, two years before, the sea had still been remote, its waves breaking far below Nazca’s altitude. It seemed absurd to be building a raft so high above the water. But after twenty years of the flood the sea-level rise was approaching some eight hundred meters above the old datum, and it was now rising at an astounding hundred meters per year, a rate that itself continued to increase. And suddenly here was the water, worming its way even into this mountainous region, and with its huge, implacable strength already starting to lift the raft up from the town that had given birth to it. The place was crowded and frantic as the final evacuation approached. People hurried everywhere, laden with mattresses, sheets and blankets, bundles of clothes, baskets full of food, pots and pans, bits of furniture, bales of string, coils of wire, spades, hoes, anything that might be useful in the long years to come, when the raft would be adrift on the face of the ocean.

  They found Maria Ramos’s home and set down their crate. Lily stepped up to the rough doorway. “Maria? It’s Lily. We have the AxysCorp gear for you.”

  As they waited Villegas peered curiously at the detail of this raft-borne dwelling. The mayor’s residence was just another shack built of corrugated iron and doors taken from some abandoned building. Chickens and pigs were restless in cages made from plastic mesh. Bowls had been strapped to the roof with bits of rope, to catch rainwater. People came and went in a hurry, adults and children, loading up here as everywhere else. Lily vaguely recognized Maria’s grown-up children and grandchildren. She had been working with this woman for years.

  A child ran across their path, making Villegas start. She was no more than five, but she carried a wicker basket full of clothes on her head. There were many, many children here, toddlers, infants in papooses on their parents’ backs.

  Villegas said, “Nathan will be disappointed his birth-control programs and his ‘voluntary limits’ lectures are not working.”

  Lily grunted. “Deeper drives kick in when you’re threatened, it seems.”

  “I suppose so. It is said that after every war there is a population surge. And what is this but a world at war? Nathan should tell more of his inner circle to come out of their high-tech fortress and take a hard look at what’s actually happening out here.”

  Which, to his credit, Juan did. As the years had worn by Lily had come to see strengths in him she hadn’t discerned in the dandyish socialite she had first encountered. Juan had always thought of himself as a weighty figure in his community, regardless of Nathan’s patronage, and that was how he behaved. And his Christianity, having been through its harsh New-Covenant phase, was now expressing itself more generously. He had become a useful ally for Lily in Nathan’s court. And despite her own occasional pangs of jealousy she was pleased that he had brought a kind of stability for the last few years to the ever-troubled life of her sister.

  Maria came out of her house. She wore a faded woolen shift, her face was grimy, and she looked tired, tense. “So you came,” she said to Lily.

  “As promised. This is Juan Villegas. Juan, Maria is—”

  “I know you,” Maria said, peering at him. “You used to be in the society pages, back in the day. A playboy, weren’t you? Dating pop stars and tennis girls.” Her English was good, and lightly accented with a mix of Spanish and Quechua intonations.

  Juan shrugged, looking embarrassed. “That was a long time ago. In a different world.”

  “Well, that’s true. But you’re surviving, evidently, aren’t you?”

  “As are you,” he said gently.

  A breeze whistled among the guy ropes, and a few drops of rain spattered on the plastic sheeting under their feet. They looked to the west, where, just for a moment, the light strengthened, the sun trying to break through the storm clouds. Maria pushed a stray lock of gray-black hair back from her forehead, and when the light caught the planes of her face this fifty-year-old woman was beautiful, Lily thought, with something of the look of a mestiza despite her Christian name. But her eyes were black with tension, her full lips pursed.

  Lily had seen this all through the Andes. Maria was of a generation that had already seen one huge dislocation. Driven out of Lima as a young woman, she had come here to build a new home, and had endured half a lifetime of withering work breaking new land. But now the sea was rolling over farms established scant years before, and Maria had to move again. It was hard for people to take. Older folk felt exhausted, unable to face another uprooting. The young, conversely, resented being driven from the only homes they had known, and blamed the old for the wastefulness that may have caused this global convulsion. Even as the huge work of evacuation continued, there were family arguments, divorces, suicides, murders.

  “The storm is coming,” Maria said. “You’d better leave before it hits.”

  Lily felt obscurely hurt by this curt farewell. “We brought you the standard AxysCorp package. Radio equipment with backups, all solar powered. A GPS navigation suite. Fifty cellphones . . .” All products of Project City’s high-tech factories, equipment designed for robustness and longevity, though many of them were assembled from the components of scavenged older gear. This was Nathan Lammockson’s standard gift to each new raft community, a way to keep in contact with them, and maybe retain some control.

  Maria glanced at the crate. “Thanks,” she said flatly.

  “I hope we’ll keep in touch, Maria. There is a chopper rota. If there are emergencies, medical needs Project City can hel
p you with—”

  “This raft could not have been built without the advice of your engineers, Lily,” Maria conceded. “But let us not lie to each other. AxysCorp encourages drowning communities to build rafts because otherwise we would all become refugees and wash like a tide up the valleys, and then what would happen?”

  “Come on, Maria. You know how it is. We’re already beyond the theoretical carrying capacity of the higher ground. We have to find other solutions.”

  “I know, I know. But is there not room for one more town, one more family—one more child?”

  “We must all make judgments,” Villegas said.

  Maria shrugged. “Indeed we must.” Another gust of wind, more raindrops. That golden light faded, clouds raced overhead, and again the raft heaved under their feet, restless.

  Juan glanced at Lily. “Perhaps it is wise to get moving before that pilot loses his nerve and lifts without us.”

  “Go, go,” Maria said, and turned her back on them.

  The raft was surging constantly now, and Juan fell flat on his face when he was tripped by a bit of plastic rope. The Nazcans were rushing, gathering children indoors, strapping down the last bits of loose gear. By the time they reached the chopper the wind was gusting, the rain coming down solidly. The chopper’s blades were already turning, and inside his rain-streaked cockpit the pilot waved at them to hurry.

  As soon as Juan had the door closed the pilot gunned his engine and the chopper lifted. The raft’s muscular surging was replaced by a sharper buffeting as the chopper’s blades bit into the turbulent, stormy air.

  The bird dipped, turning north, and Lily looked down at the Nazca raft. It was a ramshackle island that rose up amid the rooftops and drowned streets of this sun-bleached old colonial town, its back studded with shacks and wind turbines, every flat roof gleaming with rainwater pails and buckets. At the raft’s center topsoil had been spread out over a bed of stones, a splash of pale brown that would become a seaborne farm. Almost everything of which the raft was constructed predated the flood, Lily reflected, over-manufactured imperishable junk now lashed together to make this new home, rising like a dream above drowning Nazca.