Flood

by Stephen Baxter

  “But I do have my authority to maintain. If you persist in your betrayal you’re no use to me, and it’s the fishes for you, son.” He glanced out to sea. “So what’s it to be? Love or hate? Life or death?”

  Hammond tried to look away, but a guard grabbed his chin and tipped his head up. Father and son locked gazes. It was an extraordinary moment, Lily thought, pure primate drama.

  Hammond cracked first. “Very well,” he hissed, his jaw clamped by the guard’s grip.

  “What was that?” Nathan gestured for the guard to release his mouth.

  “Very well. I apologize. I apologize for my betrayal. You win.”

  “Yes, I do, don’t I?” Nathan grinned and stood back.

  The guards released Hammond. He slumped forward, rubbing the back of his legs.

  Nathan turned. “Now that’s done and we’re a family again, we can get on with our cruise.The cruise of a lifetime, ha! . . .”

  Lily felt rather than heard the engines start up, a deep thrumming that came vibrating through the decks. Glancing at the shore, she saw it begin to slide away, as the Ark pushed itself through the water under its own power. The ship’s whistle sounded, a deep bass note like a whale’s bellow. Birds flew up in a cloud from drowning Chosica.

  Nathan raised his glass, and a ripple of applause broke out among his friends.

  Hammond got slowly to his feet.

  75

  December 2035

  From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

  The first scrapbook entry Kristie made during the voyage of Ark Three was on Christmas Day 2035, the first Christmas at sea. Until then she hadn’t been able to bear to touch her handheld, not since the death of Ollantay and her mother on that calamitous day in August.

  But Nathan made an effort for Christmas, with a big party for the ship’s children in the restaurant, hundreds of them. And then Kristie gave Manco his own little party in their cabin, with seashell-paper streamers and a toy Inca warrior she had made herself, a doll knitted from the vicuna wool of their old clothes. She let Lily see her great-nephew too. Lily brought sweets. Kristie recorded some of this, for Manco’s sake in the future. It seemed churlish not to.

  But she caught Lily looking at the handheld, and her old pink backpack that she had brought from London and had later risked her neck to retrieve from under the nose of Wayne in Dartmoor.

  The backpack and its contents meant a lot to Kristie in a way she wasn’t comfortable thinking about. Her little bag of souvenirs was a last link to her own deepest past. And she had brought it with her into Cusco, on that fateful August day. Why would she have done that if she hadn’t already sensed, on some deep level, that that day would mean another break with the past? She suspected Lily was mulling over the same ideas.

  Kristie wept again that Christmas night, as she hadn’t since August. Wept for Manco and for the loss of Ollantay, wept for the arrogance and foolishness that had killed him, as she had always known it would. And she wept for London, for how far she had come, and how she could never go back.

  76

  March 2036

  Lily came out to the promenade deck’s walkway. It was seven thirty a.m. The day was overcast, gray, drizzly, but not cold, and the Ark heaved slightly on a steel-gray sea. They were underway; she could feel the screws’ turning in a faint vibration of the deck.

  Piers emerged to meet her. He wore a lightweight coverall, the sleeves rolled down. He handed Lily a John Deere baseball cap, once deep blue, now faded to a kind of gray.

  She took it reluctantly. “Must I? I never liked hats, my head’s the wrong shape.”

  “Precipitation over a millimeter per hour.”

  “Piers, we’re under cover, for God’s sake. I can see the rain, but there’s not a breath of wind. We’re dry as bones under here.”

  “Ship’s rules. Acid rain. You know the score. Better a hat on your head than a burned scalp. You’re a sourpuss today,” he said with good humor.

  She grunted. “It’s just such a lousy day. The whole world is gray. Well, come on, let’s get it over with.” She put the hat on her head.

  They took their places side by side. Piers set his watch and off they went, heading anticlockwise on their usual circuit around the hull, their pace not too fast, their running shoes padding over the polished wood of the deck. Naturally it was always Piers who ran the watch, who paced them, who kept control; Lily had long since given up arguing about that.

  They passed a couple of walkers, people Lily knew vaguely—after seven months at sea she “vaguely” knew all of the few thousand people in this floating village. Lily and Piers broke their run as they passed the walkers, who nodded and smiled. This was friction-reducing behavior Nathan always encouraged, an excess of politeness that reminded Lily of Japan, another intensely crowded environment.

  When they reached the stern Lily saw the ship’s long wake streaming behind, a highway cut across the ocean.

  They turned around the stern and headed back up the ship’s starboard side, past the gangways that led to the OTEC energy plant. This was a raft in the water towed alongside the sleek flank of the ship. The OTEC was Lily’s area of work; she had senior responsibility there. Nothing was on fire or sinking, and she was content it could survive another hour without her.

  She asked Piers, “Any idea where we are?” She had long lost interest in the details of the Ark’s wanderings.

  “The North Sea. We’re steaming south toward the Dutch coast. Then we’re going into Europe. Heading down the Rhine valley, toward Switzerland. There might be some scenery for a change.” He glanced at her. “You’re not the only one who’s a little stir crazy.”

  As if to prove the point they passed their starting line. The circuit around the deck was less than half a kilometer, and even at their modest pace they finished it in just a few minutes. Off they went again, completing their minuscule laps.

  Piers was panting hard. “Finding this tough today.”

  “Maybe it’s the carbon dioxide.”

  The unending rise in cee-oh-two levels in the atmosphere was one undeniable consequence of the flood, though there was no climatologist aboard to explain the link. Aside from the warming pulse it caused, acid rain burned the leaves of the plants in the ship’s gardens and little farm, etched away at the solar cell panels, and, sometimes, stung unprotected human flesh.

  “The young don’t seem to be bothered by it,” Piers said. “But then the young never are.”

  “No. You ever wonder why we do this, you and I, Piers? Running around this stupid track, day after day? We’re such creatures of habit. Christ, we even run the same way, anticlockwise every time.”

  Piers sighed. “You’re not going to get deep, are you?”

  “Well, you have to face it, Piers. We spent five years in cellars. Now we’re in confinement again, and here we are, running around the walls. As if we’re testing the boundaries of our cage.”

  “Or maybe we’re just trying to keep fit.”

  “Kristie says we should have had more therapy when we came back from Barcelona.”

  Piers snorted. “I seem to remember London was flooding at the time. It was hardly an opportune moment for long sessions on the couch, was it?”

  “Maybe not, but—”

  “It’s not us who have the flaws, Lily. It’s not us who are psychotic, however long we spent chained to radiators. It’s the world. The world is psychotic. I mean, is this how you imagined spending your old age? And besides, frankly, Lily, you’re one of the sanest people I know on this ship. If you’re going crazy, we’re all doomed.”

  “Maybe so.” But it didn’t always feel as if she was so sane, not when she lay awake in her bunk in the small hours, alone in her head, listening to the deep groans of the ship’s hull as she forged endlessly over the deepening world ocean.

  Looking back after seven months of the voyage, the first few days and weeks had been extraordinary.

  The intense social life of upper-crust Project City had transplant
ed itself to the Ark, brittle, gossipy, somehow desperate, as if this was simply some exotic cruise. Four-course dinners had been served in the great restaurant every night, and Nathan’s pet refugee string quartet played in the verandah bar. Amanda would have been in her element in those early days, Lily thought sadly.

  But that veneer of cruise-liner luxury hadn’t lasted. Lily had been able to keep her suite, but it was an awfully long time since anybody had come to fill up her mini-bar. In fact she now used it to keep her socks in. The always artificial barrier between “passengers” and “crew” had broken down in a farcical scene when Nathan had tried to discipline one of the kitchen staff for getting a passenger pregnant. They were all crew now, all of them had a job to do.

  And as the relationship of the crew with each other had sorted itself out, so the internal functions of the ship had been reorganized. Nathan had ordered that a few areas be kept aside for recreation and exercise, like the promenade deck track, but others had been given over to vital functions like desalination.

  One of the swimming pools was now being used as a mineral extraction area. Electrical currents were passed through sea water to make the minerals dissolved in it accrete out on metal mesh. The water was full of calcium carbonate, the relics of the shells of tiny sea creatures, which could be used to make a kind of concrete. And there was magnesium too, present at a concentration of a kilogram or so per ton of sea water. Nathan’s plan was to use these materials to maintain the fabric of the ship itself. Lily thought it was miraculous to see these substances appear out of nothing; she had had no idea that sea water itself was so rich.

  Her own OTEC plant was an experiment in extracting another resource from the water: energy. “OTEC” stood for Ocean Thermal Energy Converter. There was a temperature difference of a few tens of degrees between the warm surface of the sea and the deeps where the temperature was only ever a few degrees above freezing; just as it was always dark down there, so it was cold. The idea of OTEC was to extract usable energy from this temperature difference. The floating raft topped a stalk that plunged more than a kilometer deep into the ocean. The warm surface water was cooled a little, the cold deep water warmed a little, and the flow of heat between them could be tapped. The temperature difference was greatest in the warmth of the tropics, which was where Nathan hoped to sail his Ark for most of the year.

  There was a side effect, however, in mixing up the nutrient-rich deeper waters with the surface. Around the OTEC algae bloomed in a frenzy of feeding and breeding. These algae were harvested, especially a variety called spirulina, optimal crop plants with almost their whole substance being edible, nothing wasted on such fripperies as leaves or trunks or stalks. But the algal protein needed some heavy preparation before it became palatable for humans.

  There was something even more exotic going on in the old verandah bar on the promenade deck. With the dance floor covered over, the bar had been converted into a lab where more of Nathan’s pet scientists were trying to develop a radically new form of solar cell. The panels on the Ark’s sports deck, conventional titanium-coated polymer cells, had an efficiency of ten percent, but photosynthesizing algae could trap up to ninety-seven percent of the incoming solar energy. Nathan’s bioengineers hoped to be able to grow bright green solar panels like leaves, coated with the light-harvesting pigment molecules to be found in the algal cells. Nathan intended that in the long term these new solar arrays, with the support of the OTEC, could make the ship independent of resupply of uranium for its primary power plant. And in a world where sunlight was about the most easily accessible energy source of all, the new technology could be hugely commercially valuable.

  But Nathan had deeper purposes in mind than trade. All these projects were facets of his greater vision.

  Nobody expected the voyage to last forever; sooner or later this new Ark would come to rest on its own Ararat. But in the meantime Nathan wanted to make his floating city entirely independent of the land. He could feed himself from the sea, and collect fresh water from the rain. With the OTEC and his solar cells he hoped to harvest useful energy from the sea and the sun, and with his sea concrete and magnesium he hoped to be able to maintain the fabric of the ship herself from the resources of the sea, without resupply of any kind from the land. Lily imagined a day off in the future where every bit of the ship had worn out and been replaced by materials extracted from the sea. It would be the ultimate defiance of the flood and the damage it had wrought to human ambitions.

  For all his faults, Nathan was a kind of genius of foresight, Lily acknowledged. Maybe the world needed such dreamers, as she remembered Sanjay McDonald once saying to her. She often wondered how long she could have survived without the shelter Nathan had given her since Barcelona.

  Of course that wasn’t to say that his dream of his ship-city sailing endlessly on the sea was actually going to come true, any more than his Andean enclave had ultimately survived its greatest challenge.

  They completed their usual twenty laps, a distance of around eight kilometers. On the last lap Kristie came out to wait for Lily, leaning on the rail.

  Lily pulled up beside her. Kristie let her aunt get her breath. Piers ducked indoors, heading for his cabin and a shower—salt water, that was the only choice now. Kristie didn’t acknowledge him, didn’t even look at him. She had brought a couple of mugs of coffee substitute. Lily drank gratefully, though she would have preferred fresh water, even the vaguely chemical-smelling stuff that came out of the ship’s reverse-osmosis desalination plants.

  This morning Kristie was ready for work. Over a regular AxysCorp coverall she wore a light protective suit with a hood and goggles, and had thick gloves tucked in her waistband. She worked in a plant that had been built into the ballroom, where the shells of crab, shrimp and lobster were processed for their chitin, a substance that was used as a cellulose substitute in the manufacture of paper and cardboard. It was one of Nathan’s more ingenious schemes, a product of his endless quest to find ways for the Ark and its passengers to make a living: they could sell crustacean-shell paper to other seaborne societies. Lily thought this wasn’t as good an idea, however, as the little optical workshops Nathan had set up elsewhere aboard the ship, where spectacles lenses were ground; people would need to be able to see long after they had given up writing things down.

  “Wasn’t expecting you,” Lily said, recovering. “So what’s up? Manco all right?”

  Kristie pulled a face. “Little bugger’s a pest this hour of the morning.” Occasionally, mostly when she swore, Kristie’s London roots showed through the vaguely transatlantic veneer she had picked up. “He’s in the jungle gym. It’s better when we’re not underway, and he can go swimming. But I have to wear him out before I can deliver him to school with a clear conscience . . . Lily, I came to find you. I thought you’d like to know.”

  “What?”

  “It was on the ship’s news. The Scafell Pike beacon was lost overnight.”

  “Oh.” Scafell Pike in Cumbria was, had been, the highest point in England. “The Welsh mountains, the Scottish Highlands must still survive.”

  “Yes, and full of bandits, according to the news. Britain’s still there. But England’s gone, every scrap of it. It’s astonishing, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. And we were there at the beginning for England.”

  Kristie smiled. “When you had to come and save us from Greenwich.”

  “Well, you’d done pretty well yourselves. And now here we are at the end.”

  “We went to Cumbria a few times, the Lakes, Mum took us.”

  “I remember the postcards.”

  “But we never climbed Scafell Pike.”

  “Climbing wasn’t your mum’s thing, was it?”

  “ ‘What, in these heels?’ ”

  Lily laughed. Suddenly she longed to hug her niece, this damaged thirty-one-year old, an abrupt, powerful impulse. But she knew she mustn’t, this contact must be enough for now.

  The problem between them was Pie
rs. Just as her mother had never been able to forgive him for the death of Benj, so Kristie had never forgiven him for killing Ollantay. Lily had tried to talk her down out of that, but Kristie knew how much satisfaction Piers had got from gunning down his rival. She had seen it in his face, in his eyes, as he pulled the trigger. She had even come to blame Piers, it seemed, for the death of her mother.

  In any other age Kristie could have got away from Piers, simply moved out. But they were stuck on a boat that felt very small if you shared it with somebody you hated. In that way, Lily thought, the Ark was like a scale model of the whole reduced world.

  “Well, so much for England,” Kristie said. “Time for work.” She allowed Lily to kiss her cheek. Then they broke to begin their day. Lily headed to her cabin to change, and Kristie made for the ballroom, where the day’s batch of dead crustaceans was already being prepared for processing.

  77

  April 2036

  With great caution, the Ark approached the coastline of Europe.

  Nathan’s purpose was to reach Switzerland, where he hoped to establish trading relations with the nearest thing to a functioning national government left in western Europe. Then he wanted to pass on east to the high ground of central Asia. His destination there was Nepal: the gateway to the Tibetan plateau, a place he believed he could do good business. “It’s the most extensive upland in the world,” he declared. “And the pivot of the future for mankind. That’s why we’ve got to be there.” But the news out of the region had been fragmentary since reports of a disastrous three-way war between China, Russia and India over the precious high land—a war that was rumored to have gone nuclear before it was done. A number of the crew were concerned about what they would find, if they ever got there. But that was far in the future.