Flood f-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “Just go,” Amanda said. She practically shoved her sister out of the heavy front door, into the Andean sunshine, and slammed it closed.

  49

  Benj walked Lily through the P-ville slums to the biofuel field. Shacks slumped around them, built of sheets of corrugated iron or plastic-there was never any wood to spare. A couple of AxysCorp cops accompanied them, wearing company blue like Benj and Lily. Unlike the cops Benj carried no weapon.

  The biofuel field was an open rectangle in the middle of the shantytown’s spread. Plants unfamiliar to Lily, green leaves on foot-high stalks, grew here in neat rows. Lily knew something about this project. She had a kind of floating role in Nathan’s organization, with various assignments; she had done some work on the management and logistics of field experiments like this. But she didn’t recognize these new plants.

  She could clearly see the scar of the explosion, a blackened circle that spanned much of the field.

  Benj walked her around the field boundary. In places the fence was broken down, overrun by the moundlike forms of shacks. AxysCorp cops patrolled, automatic weapons cradled; they looked tense, alert, waiting for trouble, maybe wanting it.

  “You can see how they’re pushing in, the shacks,” Benj said. “Although Nathan has this area clearly marked out as Green Sector. Every few months we shove them out, rebuild the fences, but back they come; we don’t have the manpower to keep them out.”

  “Like fighting the tide,” Lily murmured.

  “The encroachment into Orange is even worse, you can imagine.. ” Hands on hips, he looked around, at the field, the shacks, the children peering curiously at them from the shadowed interiors. He waved and smiled at the kids; some of them waved back. “Mostly up to now we’ve been growing stuff you could eat, if it wasn’t used for fuel. Sugar cane, corn for ethanol, canola or soy for biodiesel. With those products the problem is mostly theft. We can deal with that, but Nathan got impatient with the losses. So he ordered a switch to this stuff.”

  “What is it?”

  “Jatropha. Comes from Africa, places like Tanzania, Mali. Favors hot and dry conditions. A little gen-enging and it grows fine here.”

  “And Nathan prefers it because?”

  “The oil it produces is poisonous,” Benj said.“You can use it for fuel, but you can’t eat it. So there’s no point in stealing it.”

  “Right.” Lily glanced at the fringing shacks, the round faces of the children. “But if you’re a parent trying to feed her kids-”

  “You see the problem.”

  “And now it’s come to this,” she said.

  Benj was twenty-two now. He had grown taller even than Piers Michaelmas. He would never be good-looking, he lacked his mother’s delicacy of features, but he looked competent, Lily thought, and kindly. He was quite unrecognizable from the withdrawn, gadget-hungry kid he had been in London, although that kid had always shown a lot of common sense when he needed it, such as at Greenwich, and a lot of compassion. And he had found a role that suited him, working here among the slums of Pizarroville, Project City’s unrecognized and unwelcome doppelganger.

  For all Nathan’s boasting, Project City pretty much conformed to the usual standard of a rich Green Zone surrounded by a shantytown. The slum had grown haphazardly as all slums did, Lily supposed, congealing out of the vast flows of refugees coming up from Lima and the other coastal towns. However there was some order here. Once he had recognized that P-ville wasn’t going away, that the flow of refugees up the valleys to Cusco and beyond wasn’t going to stop for a long time yet, Nathan Lammockson had done what he always did and imposed his own vision. If this slum must exist on his doorstep, it was going to be a planned slum, designed for some kind of sustainability. It was either that or have it turn into a hinterland of starvation, disease and riot.

  So there was now a crude communal water supply, rudimentary welfare and medical care, policing performed by AxysCorp guards and P-ville volunteers. There was even an economy of sorts, as the shantytown served as a pool of cheap labor for Project City. AxysCorp also rented space on shack roofs for solar-panel arrays, and paid for sewage to be used on the farms, a token fee for the slum’s only pitiful export. A kind of internal economy was growing up as well, feeding off the drowned carcasses of the lowland towns. People trekked hundreds of kilometers for salvage, even all the way to the higher suburbs of Lima, a megacity become a submerged midden.

  And in his boldest intellectual stroke Lammockson had sliced up the slum into sectors, the land area divided into rough thirds. The Silver sector was “residential,” the core of the slum. The Orange third was to be left wild. And the Green third was agricultural. The idea was to make the place sustainable. But there was a constant tension between the need for basic living space and room for crops. Lily had observed that people always seemed to find it difficult to fulfill Nathan’s visions for them.

  It was thought that a million people might be living here, drained mostly from the eight million who had once crowded Lima-a number growing all the time, such was the continuing influx and the explosive birth rate, in contrast to the declining population in Project City itself, where Nathan was running a brisk campaign to discourage unnecessary propagation. P-ville was a fecund slum surrounding an aging Utopia. And a slum was still a slum, however the world changed. The children who stared out at Lily were sunken-faced and big-eyed with hunger. These were people who had been poor in the vanished cities and were poor here now, people for whom the flood had meant only that they had swapped a slum in a river valley for one in the mountains.

  This city around a city had no name Nathan cared to give it. Those who lived here called it P-ville: Pizarroville.

  “You know,” Benj said,“there were people here who were glad when Lammockson walked in and bought Cusco. The government had been falling apart, because of the floods, and the droughts when the meltwater from the Andean glaciers was lost, and the border disputes with Ecuador and Chile. Chaos, conflict, mass migration and no functioning democracy. The people were happy to swap a set of ineffective bosses for an effective one, especially when Nathan started making so many promises about how he’d look after P-ville. There’s a widespread feeling of betrayal that it has come to this, Lily, soldiers keeping starving people out of fields of inedible crops.”

  “So what was it, a petrol bomb?”

  He grinned. “An inventive use of our own fuel. Right now I’m trying to stop this incident blowing up into some kind of policing war.”

  “I’m flying to Titicaca later with Nathan. You want me to talk to him about it?”

  “That might help. It’s still the case that what Nathan says goes.” He looked at her. “You’re going up there to talk to Kris, I guess.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Did Mum send you?”

  “No.” Lily pulled a face. “In fact she accused me of interfering.”

  “Well, you are.”

  “We can’t afford to fall out, the family. Kris is finding her own life, and that’s fine, that’s what she must do. But in the end we’re all we have, each other.”

  “But for you, ‘we’ means more than family,” Benj said. “You have your friends-the hostages. You’re always drawn to them.”

  “I see them as family too,” she said. “You know that.”

  “Yes. But I wonder if Kristie feels-I don’t know-that the others get in the way.”

  She frowned, wondering if he was trying to tell her something. “There’s a problem with Piers? Is that what you’re saying?”

  He shook his head.“I’m just not sure what you’re going to find inside Kris’s head, when-” A screen embedded in his suit sleeve flashed pink; he tapped it and looked at a bit of scrolling text. “I need to go. Trouble in another bit of P-ville-another experimental field.”

  “You want me to come with you?”

  “No. You go catch your flight with Nathan. Give Kris my love. Tell her I agree with you that she should call Mum, which will probably make h
er even more determined to do the exact opposite. And tell that Quechua chap she’s with, Ollantay, that he owes me a glass of chicha.”

  “I will.”

  “Got to run.” And with that he detailed one of the cops to escort her out of P-ville, and he was gone into the shantytown’s winding streets.

  50

  In Nathan’s plane, Lily was lifted into the sky above Cusco.

  She looked down at the old town, with its domes, cupolas and bell towers pushing out of a sea of red-tiled roofs. Beyond the fortified fence that circled the whole city she saw the brown smear of the shantytown, and the belt of agricultural land beyond, with its rough walls, banks of poplar trees, bright yellow fields, and dark scattered dots that were cows and llamas patiently feeding. Further out still, the dome of the spanking new nuclear reactor shone brightly in the sun.

  But as she rose higher yet the town nestling in its basin was lost in the detail of a crumpled landscape of peaks and table mountains, draped with low cloudlike puffs of smoke. This was the Andes, a mountain range second only in scale and extent to the Himalayas, its grandeur unconquered by the flood. As they crossed the sierra they flew over a quilt of cultivation, neat fields of barley and maize with walls of tall eucalyptus and prickly-pear cacti. This high ground had first been terraced and farmed by the Incas six hundred years ago, and was still worked today, with crops of potatoes, and with herds of llamas and alpacas loping freely.

  But peering east she thought she could see the sea of cloud that covered the new Amazonian ocean, a rainforest now submerged and rotting under a salt sea only a few years old.

  Piers Michaelmas sat ahead of Lily. She could see the back of his head, the precisely shaven hair as he sat bolt upright in his seat. He had decided he was coming along with Lily to “sort this out,” as he put it, and she hadn’t been able to find a way to talk him out of it.

  “Amazing what the Incas did up here,” Nathan murmured. Sitting next to Lily, he looked over her shoulder. “I mean, their empire lasted only a few decades. But the Incas built fast and big, and left a mark. Just like the Romans.”

  “And just like you, Nathan?”

  “Oh, don’t push your luck, Brooke. Yes, like me. Some of us have a gaze that pierces centuries. I think that was a phrase of Churchill’s.” He gazed out at his domain, and the brilliant sunlight of the high air silhouetted his fleshy face.

  The plane landed, businesslike, near the shore of Titicaca, on the outskirts of an ugly, functional town called Puno, once a base for silver mining and now the administrative capital of the altiplano. Lily and Piers clambered down under a sky of even deeper blue.

  The lake water was calm today, turquoise and flat, stretching away. The light of the descending sun caught the yellow of the reed beds. On the horizon Lily saw a serration of glaciated peaks, and clouds bubbled up from the lower ground, cumulus clouds created below this body of water. It was a sight she always found astonishing, a whole lake seven hundred kilometers long complete with islands and fishing boats, suspended three kilometers up in the sky. But even here refugees had drifted. Even here there was a kind of fringe shantytown around the shore, people squatting in crude huts of reed or overturned boats, living on the fish they caught, or the potatoes that they grew on scrubby patches of cleared ground-and, perhaps, there was a little alpaca rustling going on.

  Nathan stretched his legs for five minutes, and then got back aboard his plane with Villegas and his people, and took off for his confrontation with the intrusive British in their aircraft carrier. A few minutes later a company car arrived for Piers and Lily, a dawdling cell-powered buggy.

  The last known location of Kristie Caistor was on the Islas de los Uros. The car took them to the place on the shore where they had to catch a boat to get to the islands themselves, another AxysCorp vessel with the planet-cradling corporate logo plastered to its hull.

  The “islands” were artificial, just mats of reeds. On the largest was a kind of village of neat-looking huts of reed. Rowing boats were pulled up on the island’s soggy littoral. There was a faint smell of rot, and a stronger stink of the fish that hung on lines in rows, drying in the afternoon sun. AxysCorp’s modern plastic-hulled boat looked entirely alien.

  Kristie stood on her island home waiting for her aunt. Twenty years old, deeply tanned, she wore a tunic of brightly dyed wool and a black bowler hat. A young man stood beside her, shorter than she was, his skin a deep brown, his eyes black, wearing similarly colorful woolen clothes. Like Benj, Kristie was much changed from her Fulham days. But Fulham was vanished now, a name nobody need ever speak again; this was the reality, this eyrie lake, and this was what Kristie had become.

  As the boat drew in Kristie ran forward. “Hi, Lily! Let me help you. It’s a bit tricky to cross until you get used to it.”

  She was right. It was awkward to step from the bobbing boat onto the island, where the reeds gave way under Lily’s feet, making the footing uncertain. Lily had a flashback to when she had clambered aboard the Trieste with Thandie Jones, all of eight years ago.

  Piers followed, impatiently refusing help. Despite his insistence on coming along, he looked deeply unhappy to be here.

  Kristie’s young man held out a hand.“So you are Aunt Lily. Come, let me show you our home. We don’t get many visitors!” His English was good, with the trace accent she remembered.

  “Ollantay, isn’t it?” Lily said. “We did meet once, in Cusco.”

  He looked at her, his eyes empty, his smile faint.“ Qosqo,” he said.“We call it Qosqo. Closer to the true Inca pronunciation.”

  “The town’s name,” Piers said stiffly,“isn’t Qosqo or Cusco but Project City.”

  Ollantay turned to him, his bland smile unchanging. They shook hands, but Piers’s expression was hostile.

  They walked to a shack, bundles of reed heaped up for walls with more reeds spread in a rough thatch over a roof of corrugated iron. Birds had evidently been nesting in the thatch, and a small satellite dish sat on the roof.

  Inside, the space was surprisingly roomy and clean, with blankets hanging on the walls, and a kind of woolen carpet spread over the floor. There were boxes and trunks, and nods to modernity like nylon sleeping bags rolled up in one corner. Lily saw traces of Kristie’s old identity: the handheld computer on which she’d once done her homework and compiled her scrapbook, her old pink backpack hanging from one wall, even her battered teddy bear stuck in a corner. And Lily smelled cooking, roast meat. She suspected it was guinea pig.

  They all sat on the floor, cross-legged. Ollantay prepared a kettle to boil over a camping stove.

  “So this is your home,” Lily said.

  Ollantay said,“Actually it’s my parents’.” In my culture it’s the custom for partners to stay in the home of one set of parents or the other before marriage.”

  Kris cast an uncertain smile at Lily. “And it’s not exactly practical to stay with my mother, is it?”

  Piers said, “You should bloody well make it practical. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Piers,” Lily said gently. She said to Ollantay, “Well, thank you for making us welcome.”

  Kris said mildly, “He is being a good host actually. The usual rule is that Quechua is the language spoken here.” The tongue of the Incas.

  Ollantay said, “The true language of Peru, before it was Peru.” He poured boiling water into a pot, and set out cups, filling them with a green tea.

  Piers snapped, “But you aren’t a full Quechua yourself, are you?”

  “Oh, everybody’s mixed up here nowadays,” Kris said with an effort at brightness. “Like everywhere, I suppose. You have the fisher folk who’ve been here generations. But now we have an influx of lowlanders, coming up from the coast. And there are barbaros too.”

  These were Amerinds from the Amazon forests, some of whom had managed to keep their distance from western culture through the long centuries of colonialism and industrial exploitation. They had tribal names like Mascho Piro and Awa and Kor
ubo. But now the flood was lapping at the foothills of the Andes, and they were driven out at last, forced to ascend through the cloud forest to this unwelcoming plateau. Along with them came other inhabitants of the forest, birds and snakes and monkeys; few of these were permitted to survive by the human inhabitants, and the mountains witnessed the tip of an extinction event.

  “Funny lot, they are,” Kris said. “The barbaros. No idea of money or other languages. They don’t even know what country they’re in.”

  Lily nodded.“Nathan sends ethnographers and anthropologists. Even their languages are unknown, in some cases. And there’s a danger of infection; colds can be lethal to them.”

  “It’s all a great big flushing out, isn’t it?” Kris said. “Forest Amerinds mixing with people from the cities who might have been lawyers or accountants or computer programmers a year or two ago.. ”

  Such stabs of insight, Lily thought, made her sound like her brother-and made her seem wasted up here, by this beautiful, lonely lake.

  But Piers was still angry. “None of which,” he said, jabbing a finger, “makes him the genuine article. Ollantay. The name you were born with was Jose Jesus de la Mar.”

  Ollantay shrugged. “That’s not the name I choose to die with.”

  “But what kind of name is Ollantay? Do you know, Kris?”

  “Yes, I-”

  “Ollantay was the great general who built the Inca empire for Pachacutec. Not exactly a subtle choice, is it, Jose? And is that what you dream of, taking back the land for the Incas?”

  Ollantay smiled. Lily thought he was actually enjoying Piers’s clumsy attacks.“Well, would we not be better off if the Europeans had never come? Or if the Incas had butchered Pizarro and his holy thugs? Would we now be huddled in shantytowns while you grow oil crops to drive your cars, and the world drowns because of centuries of your industrial excess?”

  “Enough,” Lily snapped. “For heaven’s sake, Piers, what’s got into you?”