Flood

by Stephen Baxter

  Nathan made his pitch. By now he was not looking for trading partners, as in the deals he had struck in Switzerland. What he wanted, he said, was sanctuary.

  “Look, Prasad, you can see how we’re fixed. Ark Three—you must come and see her, you’d be my honored guest, we put on a hell of a dinner in the restaurant—”

  Deuba inclined his head. “It would be my pleasure.”

  “She’s a fine ship, and she might last years, decades. But maybe not forever. We need shore support. I accept that.” He waved a hand at Deuba’s villa, the reception room they sat in, expensively furnished, servants standing silently in the corners. “And I can’t think of a better place than this, a better partner than you. What I need from you is a liaison with your government, those Maoists who run your country now. We have a lot to offer.” He began running through the Ark’s assets, the nuke plant, the pioneering OTEC and manufacturing gear: the ship was a floating city full of the latest technological sophistication. “And then there are the people, my engineers and doctors and craftsmen and sailors—”

  Deuba held up his hand. “My question is simple. It is the only datum the government would ask of you. How many are you?”

  Piers said evenly, “Three thousand. That includes a non-productive percentage, the elderly, the very young, the disabled, the ill. I can give you precise figures.”

  Deuba nodded. “Three thousand,” he said mournfully. “You have seen our ever-changing shoreline, where the rafts of the dispossessed cluster like seaweed.”

  “The Ark is no raft,” Nathan said, irritation growing.

  But Deuba spoke to them of what had become of his country. “Nathan, you must understand our situation.

  “It started even before most of us knew of the existence of the flood: a slow trickle of refugees coming across the border from India. Not that we would have called them refugees then. They were rich people, coming from India’s coastal cities, and they had access to the best science data and predictions. They knew what was coming. They sought to escape the regional wars and the disruption of the flooding in the short term, and to preserve their own comfortable lives in the longer term. They came here with money, intent on buying property and land in our higher provinces. Those who sold them land quickly grew rich too. I admit I saw the straws in the wind earlier than most. I bought up a good deal of land for a pittance, before selling it on to rich Indians for a healthy profit. The result was a last explosion of twenty-first-century affluence, a building spree in this city. A country that had been one of the poorest in the world actually became, for a brief interval, one of the richest, per capita. All because of its altitude. I myself used my wealth to buy and reinforce this place, my fortress.”

  “You were wise.”

  “Yes. Because then the trickle became a stream, as those of lesser means came pouring in. The middle classes, I suppose you would say, of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They too handed over their wealth for a place in this scrap of a country of ours. Many more grew rich, at least in paper and credit and gold, but gave up their most precious possession, in return, their own land.

  “And still they kept coming, refugees from the Indian plains, millions on the move now, the poor, the dispossessed, the desperate, swarming through the drowning provinces of Utar and Pranesh and Bihar. We accepted some, we set up refugee camps. We were rich, we were humanitarian. But every effort was overwhelmed by the sheer masses on the move. The government tried to seal the border, but it is long and difficult to police. So in the end corridors were established.”

  “Corridors?” Piers asked.

  “We granted the refugees safe passage through Nepal to the higher ground, the crossing points to Tibet. We Nepali have always been a trade junction between India and Tibet.”

  Piers frowned. “What then? What became of the refugees?”

  “Ah—” Deuba spread his hands and smiled. “That is the responsibility of the properly constituted government in Tibet.”

  It was hard for Lily to dispel his manner, his patter, and think through the implications of what he was saying. “It must have gone on for years. Whole Indian provinces draining through your country. It must have taken its toll.”

  “Oh, yes,” Deuba said easily. “It began with food riots—all those people had to be fed while on our soil—we actually had a revolution. Perhaps you heard of it. Our Maoist insurgents, who for decades had been a troublesome presence in the hill country, managed to leverage the popular unrest to overthrow the government. Now we are treated to lengthy lectures on the philosophy of the great leader,” he said urbanely. “But little else has changed. The Maoists retained the old civil servants and junior ministers, and ride around in their government limousines. They even kept the monarchy, the symbol of the nation. But the Maoists have been able to maintain a productive dialogue with their counterparts over the Tibetan border, with whom they share an ideology, of sorts.

  “And of course, in the end, the flow of refugees from India dried up, though we still get a few stragglers by one route or another.”

  “Like us,” Piers said grimly.

  “Indeed. My friend Nathan, we have done good business in the past. But I have to tell you I cannot help you now. I know exactly what the government’s response will be. They will not turn you away out of hand, but will set a quota. Three hundred, say, ten percent. The most skilled of your doctors and engineers and so forth. They can stay, they will be welcomed on shore. No children, however; we have enough of them. The rest must sail away.”

  Nathan was angry now. “You’d cherry-pick my crew and tell me to fuck off? What kind of deal is that?”

  Deuba shook his head sadly. “Not my terms, my friend. My government’s. Our country is full!”

  Nathan reined in his temper. “Come on, Prasad. I know you better than that. Is this just some hard-ball game you’re playing here? Because if there’s anything you need—”

  Deuba adopted a look almost of pity. “Look around you, Nathan. What do you have that I could possibly want?”

  Nathan stood up. “All right. Then what about passage through the country to the Tibetan border?”

  “I can certainly arrange that for you.”

  “For a price?”

  “A toll. Not a ruinous one. The journey will mostly be by foot, I am afraid. I can of course hire porters and so forth. We are not short of casual laborers! But you will need to go on ahead and arrange your own passage through the border itself.”

  Lily touched his arm. “Nathan, is that really a good idea?”

  “It’s an option,” Nathan said, visibly trying to calm himself. “Maybe we can do business with the Chinese if not with this lot.”

  Deuba made placatory gestures. “Actually the Tibetan government is no longer Chinese, strictly speaking . . . It will take twenty-four hours to organize the journey. Please, accept my hospitality in the meantime. For friendship’s sake.”

  Nathan glared. Then he softened, subtly. “The hell with it. All right. I need a shit, shower and shave anyhow. But look, Prasad, I still haven’t taken no for an answer. We are decent, resourceful, law-abiding people who would be an asset to your country.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” Deuba said smoothly, “and if only it were in my power to make it so. In the meantime—come. I’ll show you to your rooms.”

  Piers and Lily stood, uncertain. Lily felt humiliated by this out-of-hand rejection. Humiliated and scared.

  They followed Deuba out of the reception room, shadowed by flunkies.

  80

  Before they set off the next morning Nathan came around his group, checking they had been taking the anti-radiation pills doled out by the Ark’s pharmacy. It wasn’t a cheery way to be woken up, Lily thought.

  Another of Prasad Deuba’s bright young men, looking Chinese by extraction, was assigned to lead them to the Tibetan border. For the first few hours they drove. Then, all too soon for Lily, they ran out of road, and the party set off on foot, the three of them from the Ark, a few AxysC
orp guards, Deuba’s guide, and a handful of sherpas carrying their luggage, wiry young men who carried huge bamboo baskets using straps across their foreheads.

  The hike was a steady climb, hour after hour, broken only by dips into green valleys, descents which always ended, frustratingly, in yet more climbing. Lily had tried to keep herself in shape on the boat, with her daily kilometers with Piers on the promenade deck and hours on the weight machines and treadmills in the gyms. But it only took half a day of this trudging climb to expose the limits of that fitness, to make her legs and back and lungs ache—to remind her that she was, after all, sixty-one years old. Nathan, now sixty-seven, was the slowest of the group and couldn’t even carry his own backpack. But sheer stubbornness wasn’t about to allow him to give up.

  Always ahead of them, floating beyond the horizon like a dream, were the gleaming Himalayan peaks.

  Lily’s sherpa was called Jang Bahadur. Aged about thirty, he was handsome, strong-looking, apparently content. He wore a white scarf around his neck, and effortlessly carried a tremendous basket full of goods, clothing, tent equipment, food. “I used to be a lawyer,” he said. “I specialized in patent law. Now I can carry forty kilograms for twelve hours at a stretch. My professors would never believe it!” His accent was some strong Indian dialect Lily didn’t recognize.

  “I keep expecting to get altitude sickness,” Lily said.

  Jang shook his head. “Unlikely nowadays, unless you climb the mountains themselves. Effectively we have lost a kilometer of altitude, thanks to the flood, and the atmosphere has been pushed upward. So, you see, while Kathmandu was once fourteen hundred meters above the sea, now it is only four hundred meters—nothing.

  “It isn’t altitude sickness that causes us difficulty, in fact, but lowland sickness. The older generation, my own parents for instance. When they came down to the sea they always found the air too thick, too rich for their blood, like altitude sickness in reverse. My mother always said she could never sleep while air like a suffocating blanket pressed down on her face. You could acclimatize, but it took time. Now it is like this even in my parents’ home, the air thick everywhere.”

  “Not everybody can adapt.”

  He shrugged. “The old ones die. My parents died. And it is true in the natural world.” He pointed at the mountains on the skyline. “As the sea ascends, so it drives zones of life ahead of it, up into the higher altitudes, until at last they are forced off the very summits of the mountains and, with nowhere else to go, must vanish. It is a peculiar mass extinction we are witnessing, a montane catastrophe.”

  She glanced at him. “You understand a great deal.”

  “For a sherpa?”

  “I was going to say, for a lawyer.”

  He smiled. “Well, most of my customers don’t particularly want to talk to me. When I walk, I get plenty of time to think.”

  That night they slept under stars, in air as crisp and clear as any Lily had ever known.

  The next day they reached a picturesque bridge across a deep valley, called the Friendship Bridge, the only remaining crossing point, they were told, between Nepal and Tibet. There was a formal entry barrier here, with a red hammer-and-sickle flag fluttering over a spectacular red and gold frontage. The barrier was manned by a handful of soldiers in brown uniforms. Their faces, in contrast to the essentially Indian features of the Nepali, were flat Mongolian. Nathan’s party and their guides were passed without much fuss, and only a small bribe in Nepali currency. They were made to understand, however, that a tougher scrutiny would follow later.

  They spent one more night on the road.

  And then, in the middle of another hard day’s walking, they broke out of the green valleys at last, and climbed up onto a flat, ruddy brown, rock-strewn terrain. There were no trees, only clumps of tough grass. Lily remembered spacecraft pictures of the surface of Mars; this place had exactly the same rusted, dust-strewn, wind-eroded look. But when she looked up she saw a range of foothills, lumpy and brown, leading away to a sawtooth row of higher mountains, a celestial beauty on the horizon. It was an astonishing sight. This was the Tibetan plateau. Lily found it hard to believe that she was here, that her own strange journey had propelled her all the way from those basements and cellars in Barcelona to this, the roof of the world.

  But the plateau was cut across by a barrier, a Berlin Wall of concrete slabs, barbed wire and machine gun towers. Beyond, Lily saw a splash of communities stranded on this bare high ground, clusters of tents and shacks, a few threads of smoke rising up into the still, clean air.

  Jang pulled up his white scarf so it covered his mouth. He glanced at Lily. “Fallout from the bombs,” he said. “My mother always made me wear this.”

  “You had a smart mother.”

  Nathan, wheezing from the exertion, led his party toward the big, imposing gate set in the fence. The Nepali sherpas were quiet now, even Jang, keeping their eyes averted from the guards who glared down from the gun towers.

  Before they got to the gate the party converged with a line of porters coming across the plain, heading for the gate from a different direction. They were laden as heavily as Nathan’s sherpas, with bulging bamboo baskets on their backs. The porters were flanked by armed men, Chinese, like sheepdogs controlling a flock. As they walked, mournful bells clanged.

  Jang murmured to Lily, “Once those bells hung around the necks of yaks. When the Russians and Chinese and Indians came here to fight over this place, they ate all the yaks, or killed them with their bombs. Now men and women wear the bells.”

  “Are these people slaves?”

  Jang shrugged. “What does that word mean? Too many people, too little room, too little food. Those who hold the high ground can do as they will.”

  At the gate the column of bearers was passed through, but Nathan’s party was halted. Deuba’s young man spoke to a commander in rapid-fire Chinese, but the guards showed no inclination to raise the barrier.

  After maybe half an hour another man came out through the barrier, an older man, a European but dressed in a kind of Mao suit, as Lily thought of it, though cut of good cloth. Aides shadowed him.

  “At fucking last,” Nathan muttered. He strode forward confidently. “Harry! Harry Sixsmith, you old dog.” He greeted Sixsmith exactly the same way as he had Prasad Deuba. Lily imagined him having a series of near-identical business relationships with men like these, studded around the planet. “You old dog!”

  Harry Sixsmith submitted to a handshake. “Good to see you, Nathan. How long has it been?” His accent was cultured, upper-class British. He was tall, fit-looking, maybe Nathan’s age, but Lily couldn’t read his expression. Certainly he didn’t look too happy to see Nathan.

  They began to confer in English, with a Chinese translation for Sixsmith’s aides.

  Piers whispered to Lily, “Harry Sixsmith is another business contact of Nathan’s. Once based in Hong Kong, but moved to the mainland after the British handover. An Englishman who made it in China. He and Nathan made a small fortune out of property speculation during the Chinese economic boom. But he’s also said to have worked on government advisory panels concerning crackdowns on dissent.”

  “Nice guy. I can’t make out what they’re saying.”

  “Perhaps my ears are sharper,” Jang said. “Mr. Lammockson’s friend is insisting that Tibet is not a place you would want to bring your people. He is trying to persuade him of this, even though he personally, Harry Sixsmith, would make a profit from it.”

  Piers murmured, “And why would he do that?”

  Jang gazed at him blankly. But Piers’s radio phone sounded before he could reply, and Piers walked away, speaking quietly into the mouthpiece.

  “Tell me,” Lily said to Jang.

  “This was a battle zone,” Jang said. “You know that. A strategic war was fought over this place by Russians and Chinese and Indians, when it became clear how drastic the flood was likely to become. Nuclear weapons were used. Local people, the Nepali and the Tibetans
, caught in the middle of a three-way invasion, had to find ways to survive, or be erased. There was huge loss of life.

  “In the end a new administration emerged, a hardline Maoist faction, basically Chinese but not attached to the Beijing government. The Maoists are supported by some Russians, Indians, westerners as you can see—even Nepali, their former enemies. Since it won power this administration has conducted campaigns against the people under its control. Cleansings. Campaigns of indoctrination. All on a landscape made barren by altitude and poisoned by radiation.

  “Nevertheless the Maoists are able to impose whatever conditions they like on those who would come here. Harry Sixsmith is telling Mr. Lammockson that if he brings the crew of his Ark here, he will be expected to pay a tithe.”

  Lily stepped closer to hear for herself. Lammockson was trying to bargain with technology, his advanced manufacturing techniques, his Norwegian seed bank. But Sixsmith said the Maoists cared nothing for seed banks. The tithe would be in drugs, weapons, women. And “underclass.”

  Lily asked, “Underclass?”

  “There are rumors of still more drastic tithes imposed on the refugees,” Jang said. “This is a poor place, crowded with people. How are they all to be fed?” He looked at her steadily.

  “Cannibalism? We’ve heard of this. Desperate communities stranded on high-ground islands—”

  “There is no desperation here, not among the rulers. The Maoists have borrowed notions of castes from the Hindus for a theoretical justification. Here the farming of people is systematic.”

  Lily stared at Sixsmith. “Jang, why didn’t you tell us any of this before we came here?”

  “You did not ask. I am a mere sherpa. In any case you might not have believed it if you did not see it for yourself.”

  “But you knew.”

  He smiled. “We Nepali imagine the future. The sea-level rise is over a hundred meters a year. Kathmandu is only four hundred meters above the sea now. In four years, or five or six, where am I to go? Perhaps I will be standing here, with my mother’s scarf over my mouth, begging for entry into this ideological Utopia.”