Flood f-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Lily said, “It’s hard to believe, all this happened to you and I didn’t even know about it.”

  “Or about your mom,” Gary said.“I’m glad I spoke to my own family, my mother. I’m looking forward to seeing her real soon.”

  Amanda poured him more tea. “When will they be sending you home?”

  “A couple more days. I hear flights out of the civilian airports are problematic.”

  “Tell me about it. Heathrow is nothing but flooded runways and power-outs.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ll blag a seat on a military flight soon enough.”

  “You’re not in the military, though?”

  “No, but I do a lot of work with them. I’m a climate scientist.” When he was taken he had been fresh out of a NASA institution called the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “That’s why I was in Spain. It’s a climate-change hot spot. The interior is desiccating, turning into kind of like North Africa-or it was. All that rain wasn’t in the old models and I’ve not caught up with the latest data. I was on my way to run some ground-truth studies of geosat observations on sand-dune formations outside Madrid, when, wham, a car pulled off the road in front of me.”

  “I can’t imagine how that must have felt.”

  Gary said, “The first thing I thought was, how am I going to finish my job?”

  Lily remembered she had felt much the same about her own abduction. It wasn’t fear that struck her at first, more irritation at being plucked out of her life, her own concerns-that and some residual shock from the Chinook crash, even though she, the crew and the passengers had all walked away from it. At first she had been sure she would be released in two weeks, or three, or four. It was some time after that that the long reality of her imprisonment had cut into her consciousness, and other, stronger reactions had started to take over. Looking back, she wondered if she would have stayed sane if she had known from the start it was going to be all of five years before she was free again.

  Amanda was watching her silently.

  “Sorry,” Lily said. “Woolgathering.”

  “There’s things we need to talk about, Lil,” Amanda said awkwardly. “The will, for one thing.”

  “Oh.” Lily hadn’t got that far, in the rather shocked half-hour since they’d arrived.

  Gary stood, setting down his cup. “You know, you two need time.”

  “You don’t have to go.”

  He smiled. He had a broad face that could be prone to fat, a mouth that smiled easily, a freckled forehead under a receding tangle of red-brown hair. Now he covered Lily’s hand with his. “Babe, you just had some seriously bad news. Look, I’ll be fine, I’ll take a walk. It’s for the best.”

  Amanda also stood. “It’s good of you, though I feel like a dreadful hostess. If you want to walk, just head down to the Fulham Road-that way.” She pointed. “You’ll reach the High Street and then the river, near Putney Bridge. There are parks, a riverside path.”

  “Sounds good to me. I’ll feed the ducks. And I’ll be back here in, what, a couple of hours?”

  “You’ll get soaked,” Lily said.

  “Not if the pubs are open. Um, can you loan me an umbrella?”

  Amanda showed him out.

  The sisters sat on the tall kitchen stools, sharing a box of tissues, talking of their mother, the house, Amanda’s kids, and how Amanda hadn’t been able to get her mother buried close by; in London even the cemeteries were overcrowded.

  “Mum left everything to the two of us equally. After she died it was all held up for a year; there was no news if you were alive or dead. Eventually the lawyers agreed to execute the will and release Mum’s estate. We got the keys and sold up and moved in. I mean, if we hadn’t I couldn’t have afforded to pay for the upkeep of this place, the recovery after the flood damage and whatnot. That bastard Jerry is still paying maintenance for the kids, but the bare minimum, it wouldn’t have helped with this…” Lily saw how distressed she was becoming, how guilty she felt. “Lil, I’m sorry. I thought you were dead. I had to sort things out.”

  Lily put a hand on her sister’s arm. “Don’t. You did what had to be done.”

  “You can move in here with us. Or we can sell the house and split the money, whatever you want. Although house prices have been flatlining in Fulham since the flooding.”

  “We don’t have to decide that today.”

  They had got some of it out of their systems by the time the front door opened and the kids came barreling in.

  5

  Lily hadn’t seen her nephew and niece for a year or more before her abduction, a gap she had had five years to regret. Now here they were, grown like sunflowers, and let out of school early to see their aunt.

  Kristie was still young enough to give her long-lost aunt a hug as instructed. Suddenly eleven years old, she grinned at Lily with a mouthful of steel brace. “You missed the Olympics,” she said.

  Benj, thirteen, with Day-Glo yellow hair, was more diffident, and he had a dreamy expression on his face, as if he didn’t quite see what was going on around him. They both wore brilliantly colored clothes. Kristie had a bright pink backpack on her back, and chunky amber beads around her neck. The children looked like exotic birds, Lily thought, fragile creatures that didn’t belong in the grimy adult world of flood damage and rain.

  “You’re home early from school,” she said. So they were; it wasn’t yet three o’clock.

  Kristie shrugged. “Wet play.”

  Amanda raised an eyebrow. “It’s the rain, the floods. They don’t let them out at break times, or for games. They come home fizzing with energy. Pain in the bum.”

  “The Olympics, though,” Kristie said. “The Olympics were right here in London and you were stuck in Spain! Did you see it?”

  “Well, no,” Lily admitted. Although the captives had thought about the London games. They marked the passing of time by such milestones, grand dates they remembered from the outside world- this must be happening about now, in some other place. “We didn’t have TV. Was it good?”

  “I was there every day of the last week,” Kristie said proudly.

  “That must have cost a lot.”

  “Not really,” said Amanda. “It didn’t go too well. The weather, the drug scandals, the terrorists. In the end they were giving the tickets away to kids and OAPs, anything to fill the stadia. After all these kids will be paying for it for the rest of their lives.”

  Lily asked, “So did you go, Benj?”

  Benj shrugged. “For a couple of days. Wasn’t much. It was years ago.”

  Amanda glared at him. “Are you on that damn Angel? What have I told you about using that thing when we have guests?”

  “Oh, Mum-”

  “I’ve heard of these things,” Lily said. “Why don’t you show me, Benj?”

  He fished in his jacket pocket and produced a gadget as slim as a cigarette. It was heavy in her hand, seamless, warm from his body heat. Benj set it with unconscious skill, Lily couldn’t follow what he did, and a bright, brassy pop tune erupted inside her head: “I love you more than my phone / You’re my Angel, you’re my TV / I love you more than my phone / Put you in my pocket and you sing to me…” The Angel beamed its music directly into her sensorium, somehow stimulating the hearing centers remotely, without the need for wires and earpieces.

  “Cor.”

  “That’s ‘Phone,’” Benj said. “This year’s big hit.”

  “I never heard it. Well, I wouldn’t have.”

  Amanda said, “Of course everybody has to have one of these things. It’s a fashion statement, you know? And it’s a pain to be zapped in the street by some kid who thinks you need a headful of drums and bass.”

  Benj nodded wisely. “That’s why they get taken off you at school.”

  “They’re working on a video version. Imagine that!”

  Lily said, “It’s amazing how much is new since I’ve been away.”

  “Nothing useful,” Amanda said. “Not really. Just distractions
. What we need is big engineering to keep the flood waters out. The Thames Barrier ought to have been just the start. But that’s not the fashion nowadays.”

  “We did the floods at school,” Kristie said. She dumped her plastic backpack on the table and began rummaging in it. “Green studies. Like how the Fens are below sea level. When it floods there the water ponds. They used to pump it away or drain it, but it’s harder now the sea level has risen by a meter.”

  “A meter? Really?”

  Kristie looked vaguely offended, as if Lily didn’t believe her.“We did it at school,” she repeated. “They told us we should keep a scrapbook of all the changes.”

  “What sort of changes?”

  “Funny things that happen with the floods. Look.” She dug a handheld out of her backpack, set it on the table and tabbed through entries. Lily peered to see the tiny font.

  The first entry was a short video clip about an old man who had been to every Crystal Palace away game for sixty years, he claimed.“Man and boy, rain and shine, I support the Palace.” His accent was broad, old-fashioned south London. “Rain and shine since I was ten year old, but I’d have had to swim to get to Peterborough this week. Never missed a game before, not one, what’s it coming to…” As a contrast Kristie had added a clip about the Cup Final being played in Mumbai; the football was either a world away, or if you followed a local team you couldn’t even get to it anymore.

  Another piece was from America. A black woman was describing how she had had to abandon her home in Bay St Louis, east of New Orleans. The Army Corps of Engineers had run a vast project of relocation back from the Gulf coast, abandoning swaths of shoreline to wetlands as a natural barrier against post-Katrina storms. This woman had had her old home bought out by the federal government, and was relocated. But she had then been forced out of her new inland home in turn by the threat of a fresh, even more drastic flooding event. “I never wanted come here, the Bay my home, my momma’s home, but Governor says, woman, you gotta go. So I pack up my kids and my dog and I go. And now look, the damn sea’s in my parlor again, and what I want to know is, what’s the point of moving if that ol’ sea he just follow you anyhow?…”

  A snip from a children’s news program outlined the effects of the flooding on the wildlife in your garden. There were striking images of river weed stuck in the branches of trees. The rain washed insect eggs off the leaves where they had been laid, so later there was no food for the birds in their breeding seasons. In Kristie’s garden, and across England, there had been a crash in the populations of blue tits.

  “These pieces are good,” Lily said to Kristie. “I mean, well selected. You have an eye. Maybe you should be a journalist.”

  “I want to be a writer,” Kristie said.“Stories instead of news though.”

  “The floods ruin the farmland.” Benj muscled in, evidently not getting enough attention. “That’s what we learned about, what’s going on in Yorkshire. You get salt water on the grass so the cows won’t eat it, and the leaves on the trees shrivel, and hawthorns turn black, and that. It’s causing a crisis in the agri-insurance industry.”

  Amanda snapped,“Never mind the crisis in the agri-insurance industry. Go and have a wash before you eat anything.”

  There was a shrill beeping. Lily produced the phone that the Embassy had given her. It was another flat, sleek product, like a pebble, smooth to the touch. She raised the phone to her ear. It was Helen Gray, angry and distressed.

  6

  Lily had no idea how to use this new-fangled phone to contact Gary Boyle. Indeed, she didn’t even know his number. So she took herself off out of the house to find him, huddled up in a heavy waterproof coat she borrowed from Amanda.

  Dodging the spray from the cars, she found her way down to the Fulham Road, well remembered from her childhood, but much altered, change upon change, much of it very recent. The grand old villas had mostly been converted to flats, or demolished altogether to be replaced by shops and restaurants and gas stations and estate agents. And you could see the scars of flooding everywhere, tide marks on low walls, slick mud in front gardens, a lingering scent of sewage. Many of the properties were boarded up, in fact, condemned because of flood damage.

  She cut down Fulham High Street, heading for Putney Bridge Road. A ticket outlet advertised discounted seats at all the West End shows. Amanda had told her it was so difficult traveling now that it was easy to get tickets for the opera, the shows, even the big football matches. Always free tables in the restaurants too, but the menus were restricted because the international food distribution business was so badly hit.

  Before she reached the river she cut down some steps to reach Bishop’s Park, a leafy garden over which the slim tower of Fulham Palace thrust to the sky. The rain, not too heavy, hissed from the thick summer leaves of very old trees. The lawns were flooded, and ducks and moorhens swam complacently on ponds that bristled with long grass and stranded trees.

  She found Gary sitting on a bench on the footpath by the riverbank, before a green railing from which hung an orange lifebelt. Lily sat down with him. Gary was humming softly, and tapping his feet. Evidently he’d discovered Angels. He had always talked about how he missed music, down in the cellars; Lily guessed he was catching up.

  The Thames was high and fast-moving, it seemed to her, an angry gray beast that forced its way under the pale sandstone arches of Putney Bridge. On the far bank boathouses glistened in the rain; nobody was out rowing today.

  Gary said, “I counted seven joggers since I’ve been sitting here. And four people with dogs.”

  “Somewhere in this park,” Lily said, “is a memorial to the International Brigade. Who fought for the republic in the Spanish Civil War.”

  “Small world,” he said. “Your sister’s hospitable. Made me welcome.”

  “Well, that’s her job, sort of. She’s an events coordinator. She’s been having time off since she found out I was released. She says she’s taking the kids out of school and to the Dome in Greenwich tomorrow, end-of-term educational treat stuff…”

  “That river looks high to me.”

  “And to me.”

  “Is it still tidal, as far as this?”

  “I think so.”

  “Look at this.” He produced a handheld, a gift from AxysCorp, on which he’d been watching news and recording clips; he shielded it from the rain with his hand.

  It wasn’t just London. Much of the country was in the grip of chronic flooding, which seemed to have become a regular event. Britain’s great rivers were all swollen, all had broken their banks somewhere, and there were refugee camps, parks of caravans and tents, on higher ground near the Trent, the Clyde, the Severn as far as Shrewsbury. There was a particular crisis unfolding this summer in Liverpool. Lily was shocked by a satellite image of East Anglia. The sea had pushed deeply beyond its old bounds across the Fens, lapping toward Wisbech and Spalding, and there were free-standing lakes everywhere, dark blue in the processed image.

  The images seemed unreal. Lily was surprised everybody wasn’t talking constantly about what seemed to her an immense transformation. But she supposed that over the years you got used to it. It was just that she had been fast-forwarded to an unfamiliar future.

  Gary said, “Some of these incidents are fluvial-exceptional rain, flooding rivers. The coastal events come from the sea, obviously… I guess you got the call from Helen.”

  “Yes. I never knew that bastard Said was the son of a Saudi prince. We were privileged to be abused by him.”

  “Yeah, so we were,” he said sourly.

  Most of their guards had been Spanish. But when they were in the hands of Muslim factions some had come from further afield. Some Muslim radicals dreamed of retaking every piece of Waqf, the territory claimed under the first eighth-century Islamic expansion, from Spain to Iraq. And so combatants were drawn to the conflict in Spain from other parts of the Islamic world.

  The prisoners had cared nothing, really, about their guards’ provenanc
e. All that mattered about the guards was how they behaved. Christian and Muslim alike, they were almost all very young men, almost all radicalized by the fiery words of preachers-almost all poorly educated, and obsessed with sex. Some were stable, almost normal-seeming; they could be friendly with their captives, and some even seemed to crave their captives’ affection.

  But some guards harmed them, even though the prisoners were supposed to have value as hostages. There could be punishment beatings, belt-whippings. Usually there was at least some such excuse for the violence, for instance when Lily had gone on a hunger strike. But some had gone further than any possible justification. These were mixed-up young men taking out their own frustration and confusion; it didn’t really matter who you were or what you had done. Lily’s own worst experience had been an amateurish bastinado: to be trussed up, hands behind her back and shackled to her own ankles while the souls of her feet were beaten with an iron rod, an unbelievably painful experience. That had not been Said but a man like him.

  She had come to believe that part of the motive for such assaults was always sexual, even if the attack itself wasn’t sexual in nature. You could feel the excitement in the man standing over you, smell the salty spice of his breath at your neck, hear the rapid pumping of his lungs.

  As for sex itself, Lily had been groped and pummeled by foolish boys, but she seemed to have had a manner that embarrassed rather than excited them. Helen Gray, fifteen years younger, hadn’t been so lucky. After two rapes by Said, or three-Helen had been taken away each time and wouldn’t talk about her experiences, though the blood and bruising made it obvious-the other guards had put a stop to it. After a time Said went away, perhaps posted to some other front of the great battlefield.