Flood

by Stephen Baxter

  On the day the ROV flotilla was scheduled to launch, the Chief of the Watch made an announcement about it over the tannoy. There was a lot of excitement among the crew, who usually behaved as if the world outside the curving walls of their boat didn’t exist at all. But the fate of a great city like London stirred imaginations. The captain arranged for the images returned from the ROVs to be piped through the ship, to the flat screens in the galley and elsewhere. Even Manco was interested, though he barely understood what was happening, and he came with Lily to the observation room.

  Thandie waylaid Lily before they went in. “Listen, Lily. I’ve had some luck.”

  “With what?”

  “With finding out about Ark One.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s something to do with Pikes Peak—the USAF base there. And there’s some kind of operational center in the town of Alma, Colorado, which happens to be the highest city in the continental US. I got a few hints because some of my buddies at NOAA are involved. It’s evidently a major operation.”

  “So what is it, another ship, a submarine, a refuge?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody’s speaking. But the leaks are coming because they’re recruiting a crew. Tough selection for skills; sounds like you have to have two doctorates just to make the short list. And single people only, no families, no kids. But they are taking pregnant women, early term anyhow.”

  “Why?”

  “Genetic diversity, I guess. As large a variation as possible given the size of the crew. If I’m pregnant I’m carrying the father’s genes along for the ride.”

  “So how do I get Grace onto this program?”

  “I’ve no idea. Tell you who I’d ask, however.”

  “Who?”

  “Nathan Lammockson. If anybody can pull the strings to swing something like this it’s going to be Nathan, right?”

  Maybe, Lily thought. But there was also Hammond in the equation, Nathan’s own son. Wouldn’t Nathan put him ahead of Grace in the queue for this miraculous sanctuary? Thinking quickly, she said, “Can you get me through to Ark Three? I’ll try to speak to Grace direct. And I need to get back to the Ark myself.”

  Thandie pursed her lips. “That depends on the captain and ship’s orders. Might be months away.”

  “I know. Whenever you can.”

  Bill called from the observation room. “Show’s starting, you guys.”

  86

  The observation room was crowded. The captain, his XO and other senior officers had come to witness this robotic jaunt live. When the door was closed, and the dim red glow was the only light, Lily felt vaguely oppressed by the unseen bodies around her. Manco’s small hand crept into hers.

  “Oh, shit,” Bill said. “Here it is.” He sang the Big Ben melody. “Ding dong ding dong . . .”

  Everyone peered into the screens.

  It was as if the ROV were flying along the bed of the Thames, heading downstream. Many of the bridges still stood, but the river bed itself was empty, the river vanished—or rather it was as if the river had risen up to drown the whole world. Boats littered the bed, sunken and abandoned. On the banks, Lily thought she saw rows of hummocks that must be cars, immobile and silt-covered. Everything was draped in a murky ooze that blanked out color and softened every profile, obscuring detail.

  To the left the ROV’s powerful lights picked out spiky ruins, a splintered tower like a tremendous stalagmite. This was the Palace of Westminster, home to the British parliament for centuries. The ROV swept away from the river and roamed over the north bank. It followed Whitehall, the government buildings outcroppings of encrusted sandstone amid the ubiquitous slime, and came to the open space of Trafalgar Square. Nelson still stood proud on his column, which was draped with sponges and weed. The ROV descended to the pavement of the square. The ooze was thick here, and there was a surprising density of life.

  Thandie spoke enthusiastically. “Remember there’s no plant life down here, only animals and bugs. So the ‘forest’ you see is actually animals, sea anemones, corals, tubeworms. And the ‘browsers’ are sea cucumbers and sea urchins.”

  Lily remembered standing in the square with Piers and the others just after the storm that flooded London. Now the living things of the deep sea, entirely alien to Lily, struggled and squirmed in the slime.

  The ROV rose like a helicopter, returned to the river and nosed forward, heading downstream. At Tower Bridge Thandie had the crew pause the ROV and douse the floodlights. After a few minutes the familiar profile of the bridge became visible, illuminated by bioluminescent creatures that clung to its stonework or swam through its broken windows. You could even see how the bridge’s carriageway had been left raised when it was abandoned, like a salute. It was a strange, magical scene, Lily thought, as if the bridge had been draped with Christmas tree lights.

  The ROV passed on downstream, over Wapping and Bermondsey, heading for Greenwich. To the left its lights glinted from the smashed glass of towering City buildings. Then the ROV rose up and panned, returning a panoramic view. As far as the lights penetrated the great reef of London spread away, its low hills covered by hummocks that were houses and churches and shops and schools, the work of centuries dissolving in the ooze. Every few minutes one of the other ROVs would drift through the field of view, probing, inquisitive, like an alien explorer.

  “Hey, there’s the Dome,” Thandie said.

  Lily peered to see. The Dome itself was long imploded, its fragile fabric structure crushed and decayed away. But the circular profile of its site was still clear, like a lunar crater, and you could see the remnants of the structures within, the concert halls and the outer band of shops and restaurants. Lily considered telling Manco that this strange place was where Lily had gone to retrieve his mother, uncle and grandmother, sweeping in on a chopper that had flown far below the present height of the New Jersey. But she couldn’t find the words.

  In the plaza just outside the Dome, near the entrance to the North Greenwich tube station, there was activity, a blur of motion raising a cloud of colorless murk. Bill tapped the screen. “Look at those guys feed!”

  Thandie said, “You get this sort of thing around a whale carcass. The deeps are basically starved of nutrition; a good fat corpse can feed whole biotas for centuries.”

  Lily asked uneasily, “But that’s no whale, is it?”

  “Not likely,” Bill said. “I’ve seen this in the cities before. Probably something like a subway station cracked open. All those packed-in bodies, you know? Preserved for years. The sharks and hagfish come first, for the decomposing flesh and the bone. Then you get the snails and worms and crustaceans, and then the clams and mussels that like the sulphides you get from decay. A big tomb can last for months. Feeding frenzy!”

  Lily held Manco close, covering his ears with her hands.

  87

  July-August 2039

  From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

  The New Jersey rendezvoused with the Ark in July 2039, a bit more than a year after rescuing Lily and Manco from the pirate raid. Kristie had a heart-wrenching reunion with her son.

  After that, Kristie’s relationship with Lily became even more tangled. She had to be grateful to Lily for saving Manco from drowning in the first place, and looking after him on the sub. But Kristie was jealous. Lily had had Manco to herself for a whole year of his young life. He came back older, a bit calmer, taller, more experienced, changed. And Kristie hadn’t shared those changes with him. She showed him recordings she’d made on her handheld in the months he’d been away, but he showed no interest.

  Nathan persuaded the New Jersey captain to stick around for a few weeks. He allowed the sub crew on board the Ark for rest and recreation, and threw some celebratory events in gratitude for the sub’s assistance, and to mark the fourth anniversary of the Ark’s launch. On the last night of the Jersey’s visit, Nathan threw a party in the restaurant, for senior officers and special guests only. The submarine crew looked spick and span in their white
s, and Nathan’s crew did him proud in their best surviving uniforms, tuxedos or ball gowns.

  And in the middle of it Nathan stunned everybody by getting up on the stage and announcing that his son Hammond had become engaged to Grace Gray.

  Kristie, amazed at this herself, recorded people’s reactions: smug satisfaction for Hammond, a kind of resigned bewilderment clouding Grace’s pale, freckled face—and a look of ice-cold satisfaction in Lily’s eyes.

  88

  August 2041

  Ark Three pushed cautiously toward the turbid, debris-strewn waters that covered the western coastal strip of the continental US.

  Captain Suarez guided her ship over the submerged coastline somewhere above the position of long-drowned San Diego, and made eastward, tracing the valley of the Gila River and roughly paralleling the US-Mexico border. She was making for narrows that ran between the Colorado plateau in the north and the Sierra Madre to the south, a new seaway between the US and Mexico. It was a gap the mariners were calling the El Paso strait. Once through, somewhere over Texas, the Ark would turn north, sailing up the east coast of the Rockies archipelago, heading for Colorado and a rendezvous with the New Jersey.

  The flood now approached eighteen hundred meters. That was more than a mile above the old sea level. There wasn’t much of North America left save islands and plateaus that were remnants of the Rocky Mountain states, from Idaho to Arizona, from Nevada to Colorado. The progress was slow, watchful. Lily knew that Nathan was well aware of how dangerous the shallow waters of the North American archipelago had become, especially since the city of Denver had at last gone under, and the rump of the federal government, relocated once again, had started to lose control of the masses who thronged the surviving higher ground.

  As for Captain Suarez, she had cut her teeth out in the open sea. She had actually captained the pirate convoy that had attacked the Ark in the Gyre before being recruited by Nathan in a typical Lammockson stunt of absorbing his enemy. Suarez didn’t like coming too close in to shore, which was always fringed by boats and rafts or whole floating cities. She didn’t like sailing through the muck that still came bubbling up from the drowned cities hundreds of meters below her keel. And, as a former pirate, she definitely didn’t like the idea of making another rendezvous with the New Jersey. But that was the plan and like all Nathan’s followers, in the end she did pretty much as she was told.

  The ship no longer much resembled the brilliantly painted liner that had been launched from its montane dockyard in the Andes six years ago, scarred, much patched, its interior gutted and its hull and decks bristling with weapons. But Lily had managed to keep her cabin on the promenade deck. Long before noon each day she was usually exhausted by the heat. So she would sit in her cabin’s shade—no air-conditioning now—and follow the ship’s progress on the flatscreen on her wall, courtesy of Nathan’s onboard narrowcast system.

  And, as the ship made its slow traverse, Grace got in the habit of joining her.

  Grace was three months pregnant with Hammond’s baby, and worn out by morning sickness. It was obvious that all she wanted was somewhere to sit, somewhere comparatively cool where she wouldn’t be hassled. Lily made Grace welcome, and kept her supplied with water, fruit and dried fish. She didn’t expect friendship from Grace, still less forgiveness for engineering her marriage to Hammond Lammockson, an act that must have felt like an immense betrayal by a woman who had, after all, promised to keep Grace from any harm. Lily took anything she could get. Silent company was enough.

  There were the same kind of relationships all over this decaying boat. You got along with the next guy, or you got rid of him; there wasn’t enough room to escape your enemies.

  Grace was looking at her. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.” Lily wasn’t aware she had spoken out loud. “Sorry.” She was sixty-five years old, no great age before the flood had come, but after a quarter of a century as a refugee she looked and felt a lot older. Everything was softening for her, she sometimes thought, the border between thought and speech blurring. “Just maundering.”

  “The map is fritzing again.”

  Lily looked at the screen. The main display showed a composite view of the archipelago of the western US, assembled from satellite images, with an outline map of the old continental coastline projected onto it and the position of the Ark shown as a bright green dot. The system was still pretty smart, and if you pointed at the screen little labels would pop up to tell you what you were looking at. Lily learned to recognize the complex inland sea that had formed over the Great Salt Lake Desert, covering Salt Lake City and much of Utah, and the convoluted tangle of inlets and bays that had resulted from the flooding of the Colorado river valley, Grand Canyon and all. The surviving dry land as seen from space was a gray-green hue, the color of crowded humanity and its shanty cities and scratch farms. It was strange to think that aside from this mass of islands there was nothing left of the western hemisphere save the Sierra Madre, stretching south, and some of the Andean plateau down the spine of South America, the mountain ranges north and south like shadows of the vanished continents.

  The map projection flickered again as the processors went offline and limped back on, balky after years of heat and salty sea air.

  Grace sighed. “I don’t know why we’re watching this. Maps are really for people like you who remember how it used to be. But they don’t matter to the children.” She stroked her bump idly.

  “They may have maps of their own someday,” Lily said. “Of ocean currents, maybe. Gyres.”

  “You don’t need a map of the sea . . .”

  Their tentative conversation broke down.

  It was like this a lot these days, Lily had observed. As if it was too hot to think, to speak, as if everybody was exhausted the whole time. You spoke a bit, and then you just gave up. Her thoughts dissolved again, wandering.

  The map recovered. The two of them sat and watched in silence as the Ark’s brave green pinpoint edged its way eastwards through the treacherous waters of the El Paso strait.

  89

  The Ark anchored a few kilometers to the east of the drowned cities of Colorado Springs and Pueblo. It was standard operating procedure to stand so far offshore. This far out, few of the dismal throng of boats, junks and rafts that haunted every shoreline were able to reach the Ark.

  A day after the Ark arrived, the conning tower of the New Jersey rose smoothly above the water. A flagpole was thrust into the air, and a brave Stars and Stripes unfurled. An inflatable launch was set in the water and came pushing toward the Ark. The launch was manned by officers and ratings in crisp white uniforms and peaked caps. Lily wasn’t surprised to see Thandie in there, in an orange life jacket.

  As the launch neared Nathan stood on the promenade deck with Captain Suarez, and Piers and Lily, Grace and Hammond, all dressed in coveralls as smart as the Ark’s one remaining laundry could turn out. Lily glanced over at Grace. She felt like warning her to take one last look at the Ark, to say goodbye. She knew she must not say anything about what was to come today.

  It was three years since Thandie had fished Lily and Manco out of the water in the Gyre, and nearly two years since the New Jersey had made its rendezvous to disembark Lily and Manco back aboard the Ark. Lily had kept in touch with Thandie about the tentative scheme that the two of them had been developing ever since. It was a scheme that none of the others, not Nathan, not even Grace herself, yet knew anything about. But by the end of today, Lily thought with a faint tremor of excitement, if all went well, it might be all over. And she could rest at last.

  The launch drew nearer. The Navy crew stared up at Suarez and her men. The sense of challenge in the air was palpable.

  “Look at those shirts,” Nathan grumbled. “Christ, they’re ironed.” He sniffed his own armpit, his fleshy nostrils twitching. “This better be worth it, Lily, whatever deal it is you’re cooking up with these arseholes.”

  “Oh, it will be,” Lily promised.

&n
bsp; “I can’t believe they’re still flying that damn flag. I mean, how many American states have even a scrap of land above the waterline? They ought to cut out all but half a dozen of those stars. And what kind of navy is reduced to one boat?”

  “We all cling to the past,” Piers said. Where Nathan, over seventy, was melting with age into a wrinkled, grouchy slob, a kind of Walter Matthau stereotype, Piers, in his mid-sixties, was going the other way, Lily thought, ever more upright, his voice ever more clipped. “If we don’t have the past, what else is there?”

  Grace wrinkled her freckled nose. “The future?”

  The launch pulled up alongside the Ark, and Nathan led the way down rope ladders to meet it. Captain Suarez and Piers stayed aboard, watching as the others descended. A couple of kids came paddling around the boat, having somehow found their way off the Ark and into the water. The navy crew watched them cautiously. The children looked like otters gliding through the water, aquatic creatures naked and brown, a species entirely distinct from the stiff uniformed humans in the launch.

  Nathan and Hammond shook hands with the senior officer aboard. And Lily embraced Thandie. Unlike Lily, who felt her years weighed heavily, Thandie didn’t seem to have aged a day, as if she had reached some kind of plateau.

  The crew handed out life jackets, and the launch put about and headed for the shore, off to the west. Lily saw they were to be escorted by a couple more launches from the submarine. She could see why; the inshore waters were black with shipping.