Houston from the air was utterly flat, a grid-plan cityscape set down in a country of low hills, pine forests, swamps and bayous. The only topography was man-made; the glass blocks of downtown looked like a huge sculpture set up on the plain. To the east was the bay, with the lines of the Ship Channel clearly visible and more industrial sprawl beyond. This was the area colonized by the petrochemical industry, domed storage tanks and spindly fractionating towers like a comic-book city of the future, spreading kilometers away toward the Gulf of Mexico. On the bay itself a tracery of levees and barriers gleamed, protection against the rising sea, huge constructions in themselves, brand new. But Lily saw that, despite the new defenses, the bay waters had already penetrated the old coastline, and pooled at the feet of the white storage tanks. All this under a pale smoggy sky, in heat so intense the air shimmered, a city under a grill.
Lily looked along the sweeping curve of the Gulf Freeway, hoping to glimpse the blocky architecture of the Johnson Space Center where tomorrow she was due to meet Gordon James Alonzo, a real-life astronaut. But it was lost in the detail.
On landing she took a call from Piers, advising her on where to meet him.
The airport terminal building was a glass block so aircon-cold she considered digging a sweater out of her carry-on bag. Then she had to walk a few meters under the open Houston sky to a waiting limousine, and it was like stepping into a sauna. When she got into Piers’s car it was so cold it made her shiver again.
Piers wore an open-necked, short-sleeved white shirt, and black shorts that looked like cut-down suit trousers. It was nine months since Lily had last seen Piers, back in London; she’d suggested meeting up when she found out they were both going to be in the Houston area. He patted her shoulder brusquely, and took her bag and lodged it on the floor. The car pulled out. The driver was all but hidden behind a screen of smoky glass.
“You still travel light,” Piers said.
“I live light,” Lily said as she buckled up. It was true; what she owned wouldn’t have filled more than two or three backpacks. “I’ve never felt the need to acquire much stuff. Certainly not since Barcelona.”
“Quite. It’s not really a time to put down roots, is it? Not unless you’re a banyan tree.” There was that mordant wit, the infrequent flashes of which had always made her feel warm. “So was the flight OK? How do you feel?”
“Like I just jumped into a plunge pool.”
He laughed. “Ah, that’s Houston for you. Always been a tough environment, as hot as Calcutta, barely a human place at all. And, I must say, when I started working here I came down with a string of colds. My doctor said my immune system was weakened by the temperature swings. And how are Amanda and the kids?”
“Fine. Still in their caravan park outside Aylesbury. They still haven’t been allowed to go home to Fulham. The kids swim to school. I’m kidding! My own work’s going OK.”
“On this diving project, I suppose.”
“Just background stuff for now, mostly in England.”
They were driving toward downtown; the central skyscrapers loomed ahead. Houston seemed to be a mash-up of residential, industrial and retail developments. It looked rather dated, Lily thought, very 1960s. She saw sprinklers working away at lawns of tough-looking thick-bladed grass.
Piers’s manner and accent hadn’t changed at all, despite his immersion in Texas for so many months; he was still cool, ironic, officer-class British. But his eyes occasionally unfocused. He must have an Angel, or the latest mil-spec equivalent, speaking in his head; even in her company he remained separated, alone. But, clear-eyed, clean-shaven, his hair neatly cropped, he looked healthier than she’d ever known him.
“I can see you adapted, Piers. Nice shorts, by the way.”
He raised his eyebrows. “My shorts are serviceable and neat, thank you.”
“You’re enjoying life here, aren’t you?”
“Well, Americans are always welcoming. Houston’s a pretty diverse place, I think. There’s even an Iranian district now, quite remarkable. But the main thing I like is the room. Only an hour to the Gulf coast, only a day’s drive the other way to desert, or hills.. The work is the thing, of course. Having something meaningful to do makes a big difference to one’s morale, doesn’t it?”
“That it does. I saw the levees from the air.”
“They’re talking about a tidal barrier further out, a series of gates that would dwarf the Thames Barrier. Typical bloody Texans. But they do have a lot to protect. Most of the detailed work I’ve been doing has concerned Houston’s petroscape.”
The protection of the Gulf was a public and private project, a shared task of governments, oil companies and other multinationals. Piers was the leader of an exchange party from Britain, who were applying the lessons learned safing British oil facilities like Canvey Island to the much larger-scale problems here.
“You wouldn’t believe the size of it, Lily. This is the largest concentration of petrochemical refinery and storage facilities in the world. A hundred kilometers of tanks and cracking towers, stretching from Houston all the way to the coast.”
“And all of it threatened by the sea.”
“Quite,” he said mildly. “Galveston Island, for instance, rises only three meters or so above sea level-I mean above the old datum. Houston is even worse off. It was built on marshland in the first place, and there’s been subsidence because of the oil and water they’ve been pumping out of the ground here for so long. In some places the city is actually below the old sea level. Well, we know that the average global rise is already up to five meters. If the sea did break through-well.
“But immense as it is, this project is an incident in the bigger picture. You have to see that this is a global crisis, impacting a world already afflicted by climate change, energy shortages and ideological tensions. We are trying to save the hubs.”
“The hubs?”
“You’d be surprised how dependent our world-wide network of energy and material flows is on a few key nodes. Grain silos, power stations, oil sources and refineries.”
“Like Houston.”
“Like Houston. And of course an awful lot of these facilities are on the coasts, even on flood plains. So we’re trying to sustain that network as far as possible. In the short term it’s all about emergency measures. For instance we’re trying to make sure all the tanker fleets are kept at sea. Any manufacturing or processing facility we believe might be lost is being worked as hard as possible to produce durables for the transition period-that is, the transition until everything’s been moved inland or uphill, and is made safe against the floods. Bronze, stainless steel, plastic, that sort of thing, age-resistant. You should see the Goodyear plant.”
“Goodyear? The tires people?”
“They’ve been here for decades. Now they’re churning out mountains of the damn things.”
“Why do we need tires?”
“Rafts,” he said.
That simple word took her aback. She had had the sense with Piers since they had come out of Barcelona that he was much closer to the center than she was, that he knew far more than she did, that he looked that much further into the future.
The car slowed. They were southwest of downtown at an intersection of two major avenues, Montrose Street with Westheimer Road. She glimpsed galleries, cafes, restaurants, bars, shops. It was a lively area that Amanda would probably have called “counter-cultural.”
“This is the Montrose District,” Piers said. “One of the few walkable neighborhoods in the city. I thought you’d appreciate being here. Your hotel is just around the corner-there, you see? Look, I have to go back to work for a few hours. Sorry to abandon you for now.” He handed over her bag.
On impulse, she kissed him on the cheek. “Later then.”
“Sure.”
The car door opened, and Lily jumped out. Again she was struck by the sheer physical intensity of the sunlight that bounced off the sidewalk flags. There were few people around in the heat of
the day.
Piers called from the car, “Oh, Lily-make sure you’re in your room at about midnight. I’m fixing up a conference call with some old friends. Call it my treat.”
“It’s a date.”
The car closed itself up and slid away. She hurried up the steps and through sliding doors into the hotel’s cool, dark interior.
23
Helen Gray and Michael Thurley took a late breakfast in the IAEA trailer they shared.
Then, still early in the morning, they prepared to take Piers’s conference call. They installed themselves in a bar close to the waterfront of Bushehr’s old port, and set up their laptops on a plastic table. The computers were battered relics of the noughties, all the International Atomic Energy Agency could afford. The heat was already gathering. But the open-fronted bar was used to western visitors, and was equipped with fans and plenty of iced water, and would be bearable for an hour or more yet.
While they waited for Lily to log on Helen sipped orange juice, and looked out at the Persian Gulf.
Bushehr was at the end of a long, flat island, once joined to the Iranian mainland by a tidal marsh; now it was cut off by the rising sea, and you got here by boat or aircraft. A battered cargo ship made its way toward the deep outer anchorage, probably stuffed with the dried fruits and raw cotton that were the principal exports of the region. Its gray form passed between rows of buildings. Looking inland Helen could make out the industrial hinterland of the old city, the food-processing and engineering facilities attracted here to serve the regional oil distribution center that was the town’s main function. There was a smell of spices, of oil, of hot metal, of thick coffee from inside the bar, and a muezzin call floated on the hot morning air.
And there, like a pale mushroom rising above the old port, was the containment dome of the nuclear power plant, the reason they had come here.
The laptop screens lit up. There was Lily sitting in what looked like a hotel room, and Amanda, her sister, in the cramped confines of a caravan or a mobile home. These were just still images. They had to wait a few more seconds for the links to be fully established; bandwidth wasn’t what it used to be. Helen and Michael had never met Amanda, but had got to know her online through Lily, like a member of an extended family.
Helen murmured to Michael Thurley, “So this is it. No Gary, no Piers-even though Piers is supposed to have set up this online reunion in the first place.”
Michael said, “Well, Gary’s at the bottom of the bloody sea somewhere, so you can’t blame him. But as you say, Piers set it up. You’d think he could find half an hour to speak to us.”
“He did it for Lily. That’s what he says.”
“Surely for himself too.” Michael rubbed an unshaven chin. “I was brought up a Catholic, you know.” Actually she hadn’t known that about him. “We were quite a tight community, we Hampshire Catholics. Not many of us, for one thing. I lapsed at a young age, seventeen or so.” He smiled. “Not everybody in the church was as tolerant of my homosexuality, my ‘sin,’ as they might have been. But my mother continued to practice.
“A few years later my father died suddenly, and my mother said she had lost her faith. She stopped attending Mass. I found it rather upsetting. Although I had no intention of going back myself, I found it somehow comforting that she continued to practice. As if I had a route back. Well, she did go back for my sake, she made her confession and that was that. A good thing too. I think she found the church a comfort in the years before she died.”
“So maybe Piers is the same, you think. He won’t meet us, but it’s comforting for him to know that the rest of us still do.”
“Perhaps. But do any of us really understand each other? Why, I don’t even understand us.”
And nor did Helen, though she had had to try to explain her relationship with Michael to the IAEA inspectors and nuclear engineers, western, Russian and Iranian, who regularly hit on her. She was a single mother, Michael a homosexual in early middle age, and they were locked in a peculiar relationship: sexless, passionless-but not really platonic, it was more than that. They had come together in the trauma of the London flood, of course. Maybe they had found in each other something they needed, something each had lacked separately.
Or maybe, on some deeper, more cynical level, all she really cared about Michael was that he still represented the best chance she had of getting her child back.
Lily’s image jerked to life. “Are we on? Howdy from Texas.”
Amanda smiled, her face lighting up, and blew kisses.“Hello Bushehr, here are the votes from the Luxembourg jury.”
Helen and Michael waved back, feeling foolish, sitting in this empty bar waving at aging laptop screens.
They quickly established where and when they were: Lily in her hotel room in Houston at midnight, Amanda in a caravan in the Chilterns, not far from Aylesbury, where it was very early morning,“sitting on a hillside with a bunch of sheep and half the population of Chiswick,” and here were Helen and Michael outside an Iranian nuclear plant, some thousand kilometers south of Tehran.
Amanda said,“I don’t really understand why you’re there. Aren’t you looking for your baby, Helen? His father was Saudi, not Iranian. And I don’t know what you have to do with nuclear reactors…”
It was a complicated story. This reactor, built under contract by Russian engineers, was not long ago a pricking-point of world tension as a pivotal point of Iran’s uranium enrichment program. But Bushehr sat right on the Persian Gulf, and, like more than four hundred of the world’s nuclear facilities, was threatened by the rising sea. Not only that it was a lousy piece of engineering, full of design flaws eradicated from most plants since Three Mile Island. The IAEA team were rushing to work with the Iranians to decommission it before the sea had a chance to overwhelm it.
“Naturally HMG is supporting that effort,” Michael said.“I managed to get myself assigned to our small diplomatic team. All an excuse to stay close to the trail of baby Grace, you see.”
Grace had disappeared into the complicated clutches of Said’s branch of the Saudi royal family. One patriarchal figure in that branch, however, a distant cousin of the Saudi king, was more of a realist than the rest, and had appeared to offer compromises. This man had been swept up by the global crisis, as had everybody else, and had been sent to Iran as part of a Saudi inspection party. The Saudis needed a presence here because any fallout from Bushehr would have threatened the whole of the Gulf downwind, including Kuwait, Dubai and Saudi itself.
Michael had got himself attached to this mission in the hope of making contact with this helpful Saudi prince. “But progress is slow,” he admitted.
Helen thought that was an understatement.
Amanda shifted in her chair. “Well, we couldn’t get much further from the coast, and just as well. There’s something I want to show you.” She tapped at an out-of-shot keyboard. “I’ll see if I can download it. It’s a map they published yesterday. I wish Benj was up, he’s the one who’s good at this stuff, but he won’t be awake for another six hours minimum… Here we are.”
Down came an image of Great Britain, as the country had been transformed by the flooding, a composite of hundreds of satellite photographs. Helen quickly found that it was interactive; you could touch the screen and it would allow you to zoom and pan, and overlay town names and roads. They played with this for a while, discussing what they saw.
The map was strikingly different. The Thames estuary had broadened to a bay that swamped the marshes of Essex and North Kent. The beaches of the south coast resorts had vanished. In Somerset the sea had swamped the marshes and peat moors, and lapped around Glastonbury Tor. In East Anglia the Fens’ ancient drainage systems had been overwhelmed, and the sea had pushed inland for sixty kilometers or more, through Peterborough to form a new shore at Cambridge. In the north the Humber estuary now snaked into an inland sea that covered what had been low-lying Yorkshire farmland. In the west the Lancashire coastline from Liverpool up to Lancaster was
submerged; the city of Liverpool itself had been all but abandoned.
Helen felt oddly dislocated. Her years in Barcelona had jolted her out of her lifelong habit of taking in information through screens. She had to remind herself that this was real, that the sea really was taking these big bites out of Britain, that this was the changing country Grace would come home to, someday.
Amanda was talking of her life in the caravan park. Even now, though the worst of last year’s storm-driven London floods had receded, the resources hadn’t been found to repair the abandoned housing stock in Fulham and Chiswick and Hammersmith and elsewhere. “These caravans are putting down roots. We’ve got mains, electricity and water! But it drives me crazy, it’s so small, I don’t have three quarters of my stuff…” Helen sensed that under her sparky talk Amanda found the thought that she might never be allowed back home, never able to rebuild and repair, disturbing on some fundamental level.
In the meantime life in Britain was changing in more subtle ways. Transport was more difficult, with washed-out road and rail links and the steadily increasing cost of fuel, and this was forcing a profound adjustment on everybody. Amanda’s kids were going to local Buckinghamshire schools, crowded with London refugees who were picked on by the locals. Amanda still commuted daily into her job in London, but she made the last leg on a riverboat that sailed past drowned river-front flats. She did her shopping in a Waitrose or a Tesco’s in Aylesbury, going in and out by bus, but what you could buy in the supermarkets changed daily as their supply and distribution chains broke down. Small independent stores were making a comeback, in fact, boasting fresh local sources.
“Everything is sort of stretched out of shape,” Amanda said stoically. “I sometimes think it’s as if we’re regressing to the past. Local schools, jobs, food. But things are still working, just.”
Lily sympathized about the caravan. “I can imagine you and the kids crammed in there. I expect I’ll have more room in Gary’s submarine.”
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