Flood f-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “Give me what’s she’s having, please.”

  Jorge bowed and withdrew.

  Lily sat gingerly on the edge of one of the room’s sprawling sofas.

  Amanda watched her soap opera. She was over fifty now, still beautiful, Lily thought, still slim, still possessing that unconscious flexibility of pose that men always found so attractive. But the bitterness that had been planted in her when Benj had been killed in P-ville was apparent in a tightness around her eyes, a smallness in the way she held her mouth.

  This room of shining leather and polished floorboards was adorned with artifacts looted from the submerged cities. JuanVillegas, born a Catholic, had acquired a fine collection of church plate, stored in cabinets of bullet-proof glass, a row of chalices lined up like sports trophies. Rumor had it that he had an entire door detached from Lima’s cathedral.

  Jorge returned with Lily’s drink, and withdrew. Lily sipped it; it was very strong.

  “So,” Lily said, uncertain. “Where’s Juan today?”

  Amanda waved a hand, and the soap volume reduced. “Out with the Holy Guards. Should be back soon.” She looked at Lily. “You don’t change, do you? A bit more leathery.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re pale, though.”

  “That’s the sunscreen and the hats. It’s hot out there, Amanda.”

  “Which is why I never go out. Still working on the gen-enged crops, are you?”

  “That and Nathan’s agricultural program in general…”

  She spoke about Nathan’s current schemes, as his scientists labored to resolve the pressure on the available agricultural land. Nathan’s new cultivars of maize, corn and rice were resistant to drought, and more nutritious than the old forms. The most radical technique was to turn single-season crops into perennials: varieties of wheat and barley and maize that didn’t need sowing. That would save hugely on labor, and permanent root systems would dig deeper and seek out nutrients and fresh water, ever more scarce on the surface. Argentina and Mexico had always been big on transgenic crops before the flooding, and recruiting genetic engineers for this sort of work hadn’t been hard.

  There was also a longer-term program of adaptation. As the sea level rose, it was as if the farmland was on a sinking elevator. For now the agriculturalists were cultivating crops suitable for montane conditions. But in the future, as ecological zones migrated upward, they might have to shift to a different suite of crops suitable for lower altitudes. All this was strange and scary to think about, but Nathan insisted they prepare even so.

  Lily tried to tell Amanda how good it was to be out among green growing things-even if it was a strangely quiet countryside. There were few farm animals now; chickens and pigs were kept to consume vegetable waste, thus maximizing land use efficiency, but cattle, sheep and even the native llamas and alpacas were seen as too expensive. It was like this all over the world, it seemed. It was extraordinary that an extinction event was going on even among domesticated farm animals.

  Amanda listened, but she clearly wasn’t interested, and let her attention drift back to the flickering images of the soap actors.

  Lily shut up, and sipped a bit of the vodka. Then she said, “So-Kristie.”

  Amanda raised her eyebrows. “She wants something. That’s the only reason she ever gets in touch with me. Otherwise I have to rely on reports by the AxysCorp cops just to find out what she’s up to. Juan has access to her crimint file. Surprising how much you can find out about people that way.”

  “Come on,” Lily said. “Kristie’s not a criminal.”

  “Maybe not, but last month that Quechua boy of hers was a millimeter away from a conviction for disrupting potato shipments from the Titicaca area. What an idiot he is. I had to pull strings with Juan to get him transferred to Chosica and the Ark project. Otherwise he’d have been exiled.”

  Exiled: banished from all the Andean communities under Nathan’s direct or indirect control, and so cast into an outer darkness of chaos, hunger, flight and disease.

  “And of course he took Kristie with him. Even if he’d been sent away she would have had to go with him. Oh, she’d have had no choice. Juan would have seen to it. He’s very much a supporter of the New Covenant, you know. It’s all black and white with him now. If Ollantay hadn’t shown a residual bit of common sense and backed off, I couldn’t have persuaded Juan to spare him, or Kristie. Why should he?” She took another strong slug of her vodka, and put the glass on the arm of her chair. From nowhere Jorge appeared with a fresh, full glass, which he smoothly substituted; dew gathered on the chilled crystal.

  “But this time it’s different,” Lily said. “I mean, she’s contacted me as well as you. Maybe she’s got some other kind of news. Or maybe she just wants to see us-”

  “You’re dreaming.”

  “Let’s go together,” Lily said impulsively. “I have to go down to the coast tomorrow. They’re mounting another dive into Lima. Sanjay McDonald is supposed to be there, running the science for Nathan.”

  “Sanjay who?”

  “Climate scientist. He was in London. An associate of Thandie Jones, who knew Gary. As far as I know Gary is still with Grace, somewhere in the US. With any luck Sanjay will have some news about them.”

  Once more Amanda’s eyes drifted back to the murmuring soap. As the years had passed she had grown less and less interested in Lily’s connections with the Barcelona hostages. But conversely, as her own family had disintegrated around her, Lily’s bonds to those who had shared her captivity seemed to grow stronger.

  “Never mind that,” Lily said. “When I get back let’s go see Kristie together, you and me.”

  “You and me and Michaelmas, you mean.”

  Lily said tightly, “Piers is my partner. He cares about us.”

  “He’s a locked-in obsessive who ‘cares’ about Kristie.”

  “That’s just foolishness. A weakness. Something Piers deals with.” That was true enough; it was a trait in himself Piers despised.

  Lily had long got over her own odd, surprising stab of resentment at his feelings for Kristie. She knew Piers had never loved her, and never would; in fact she had come to believe that despite a divorce and a couple of failed relationships he hadn’t truly loved anybody before. Somehow, for some reason, presumably as a product of the last few impossible years, he had become fixated on Kristie, a girl he barely knew. But Piers was in his mid-fifties now, and Kristie only twenty-six. Such love of the old for the young was a kind of mourning.

  Well, if I can live with it, Lily thought, so can you, Amanda.

  But she knew that Amanda’s problem with Piers was not only his peculiar, longing fixation with Kristie. No, Amanda’s problem was that she had come to blame him for the shooting of Benj, caught in the cross-fire that day in Pizarroville. Piers had been nominally responsible for the security operation. It was a responsibility he fully accepted, though in any moral sense it wasn’t his fault. None of that helped with Amanda.

  “Look, Piers isn’t a bad man. He’s shouldering as much responsibility as anybody else here. We all have weaknesses. We all make mistakes.”

  Amanda scrunched up her face and turned away. “Juan doesn’t make mistakes. Or he doesn’t think he does. Right now he’s out with the Holy Guards, patrolling the eastern foothills for refugees.”

  As the sea-level rise had continued, now approaching an astounding four hundred meters, the flow of refugees was relentless. So Nathan had created the Holy Guard, tough, heavily armed units that went out into the chaos, doing whatever it took to deflect the refugee swarms. Many of the Guard were recruited from Pizarroville-the desperate poor fighting to keep what they had.

  Lily said, “It’s a tough job. I couldn’t do it.”

  “That’s the trouble,” Amanda said.“Juan can’t either-or he couldn’t, until he fell in with the New Covenanters. He’s a man of conscience, believe it or not. He needs to find a way to justify what he’s doing.”

  Lily knew the theory. If God
had broken the Covenant He made with Noah after the Biblical flood-Genesis 9:11: “Neither will there any more be a flood to destroy the Earth”-it could only be because humans had broken it first. But was God punishing all mankind? Surely those who had been wise enough to move to higher ground early were a kind of elect, raised out of the herd of sinners, and had a duty to preserve themselves for a new post-flood age to come. And conversely those who had not been smart enough to prepare showed their weakness as well as their sinfulness. So the high-altitude elect therefore had a holy duty to stay alive and hold onto their ground.

  “They’ve had meetings about it here,” Amanda said, fiddling with a lock of hair. “Business types like Juan, but also soldiers and doctors and priests. I have to organize drinks and nibbles while they talk about the best way to machine-gun refugees, and the moral justification for the culling.”

  “ ‘Culling’?”

  “We had a doctor here who talked about ‘apoptosis,’ which is a phenomenon of the body, unhealthy cells committing suicide to make room for the healthy. It’s got pretty elaborate, theoretically speaking. They’ve written up screeds of justification for what they’re doing-it’s all online, you can read it if you want.”

  “God, Amanda. I don’t know how you deal with this stuff.”

  Amanda flared suddenly.“I hate it, if you want to know. Don’t you? I hate everything about the way we live here. Living behind walls, behind wire and machine gun towers, while everybody else starves. Nathan with his mad schemes, his artificial crops and his ocean mines and his stupid Ark. People like Juan, decent enough once, now going slowly crazy because of what they’re doing to stay alive. And me with a son dead and a daughter who won’t speak to me except when she needs me to keep her out of prison. I hate it all. My life started going downhill when Jerry walked out on us, and it’s got steadily worse since. When we were growing up in Fulham I never would have dreamed it would come to this.”

  “No.” Lily had an impulse to go over to her, to comfort her. But Amanda looked away.

  Lily stood up, setting down her drink.“I need to get ready for my trip to Lima. I’ll call you when I get back. And we’ll go see Kristie together, yes?”

  “Whatever.” Amanda sipped her drink and waved her hand, making the voices of the soap opera characters swell and boom so they filled the empty room.

  56

  With a bit of arm-twisting by Piers, Lily got a seat on a supply chopper flying out to Lima.

  The coast was draped in the low, clinging fog the inhabitants of Lima had once called the garua, so the chopper descended into a white-out. And then the complicated, boxy superstructure of an oil rig came looming out of the fog. Lammockson had established this old rig over the heart of the drowned city as a base for his continuing salvage operations.

  The chopper landed on the rig’s upper deck, and Lily scrambled down.

  She found she could walk to the edge of the platform, which was fenced off by a rail and sheets of Plexiglas. The sea, gray and rolling, stretched off to a horizon blanked out by the garua. She might have been in the middle of the ocean. In fact she was standing directly over the heart of a megacity, of which there was no sign at all.

  An AxysCorp flunky came running to meet her, an earnest young man prompted with instructions from Piers. Sanjay was on the rig, but was supervising a deep-dive submersible descent into Lima, and she had some time to spare, maybe an hour. The flunky tried to persuade her to go down below where it was safe, to have some food, a beer even, watch some TV. She refused. She needed the air. She was given a thick coat to pull on over her coverall, and a cup of coffee, and she got away from Piers’s nanny and went walking around the rig platform.

  She passed among outcroppings of machinery, like open-air sculptures, attended by engineers in hard hats and coveralls. She recognized some of the operations going on here. Most of the salvaging operations were run remotely, with cranes lowering robot machinery with manipulator arms and cutting gear down among the drowned buildings. Even after years of systematic plunder, Lima, like all the world’s lost cities, was still a tremendous lode.

  But Lammockson always thought ahead, and more advanced technologies were being trialed on the rig. His surveyors told him there was gold, zinc, copper, silver and lead to be found under the ocean floor, raw materials for the long-term survival of civilization. The scientists even knew where to look, around big volcanic deposits called “sea floor massive sulphides” built up by hydrothermal vents, places where water circulated through deep cracks in the sea-floor rock, dissolving metals as it moved through the rock and precipitating them out in conical black chimneys. So Lammockson was creating an ocean-floor mining capability. He had other teams of experts working on locating undersea oil deposits. Sea mining had been frowned on in the past because of the damage the noise, sediment plumes and turbulence might do to fragile seafloor ecologies. Nobody cared about that anymore-or at least nobody was in a position to police it.

  Lily was watching a fresh robot salvage machine being lowered over the side when Sanjay came up to her. “Lily! What’s a landlubber like you doing on a rust bucket like this?”

  As usual when she met a face from her past, Lily felt overwhelmed by a spasm of emotion, a peculiar kind of longing. She grabbed Sanjay and hugged him. “It’s good to see you.”

  He submitted gracefully enough, and hugged her back. Sanjay, short, compact, dressed in a standard-issue AxysCorp coverall, didn’t show his forty-five years save for the gray in his beard. He said, “You want to go down into the rig? There are lounges, bars. Get you out of this breeze if you feel like it.”

  “Would you like that?”

  “Well, I’ve been in that control room for hours, sniffing up cigarette smoke and stale beer and coca-plant halitosis. I’d rather stay out in the fresh air if you can stand it.”

  “Then let’s walk.”

  They continued Lily’s slow perambulation of the deck. Sanjay asked about Amanda, and he spoke of his children and their mothers in the Scottish archipelago, where an extraordinary new amphibious society was emerging among the clans.

  Sanjay said the DSV dive just completed had gone well enough. “Though these days I rarely have to make them myself, thank Ganesh for that. Look, you can see the boat.” He pointed to an ungainly craft that dangled from a crane, dripping; it looked oddly like a conventional submarine cut in half, with manipulator arms, cameras and windows cluttering the cut-through cross-section.“That’s a COMRA. Developed by the China Ocean Mineral Resources R amp;D Association.”

  “A Chinese design?”

  “Purchased by Lammockson for AxysCorp for a huge price-along with luxury villas in Project City for its crew and engineers. One of the most modern designs from the preflood days. The dive into Lima went well. We went down to the cultural center around the Plaza Mayor, and the shops at Miraflores. San Isidro, the business district, is pretty accessible. And we got some good science data. Actually the dive was paid for by a Quechua community, up in the Andes somewhere. They had salvage targets of their own.”

  That pricked her curiosity, and she wondered if it had something to do with Ollantay, but she wasn’t much interested in the mining of Lima.

  He said now, “I heard from Gary Boyle.”

  “Via Thandie Jones, I guess? I haven’t heard from him for years.”

  “Well, he isn’t in a place it’s easy to send postcards from.”

  “Where is he?”

  “That’s just it. Nowhere…” He told her how Gary was now part of an itinerant community, thousands of people wandering through the crowded western states. “They’ve been on the road for years, Lily. After they were forced out of their camp at Amarillo, they have failed to find anywhere permanent to stay.” Sanjay shrugged. “It’s happening all over, from what I hear. Tremendous populations on the move, washing back and forth in search of room to live.”

  “Gary still has Grace with him?”

  “Oh, yes, according to Thandie. Michael Thurley too.”
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  “Grace must be sixteen now.”

  “Yes. And a stroppy teenager, according to Thandie.”

  “That’s healthy,” Lily said firmly.“I wish there was something I could do for them.”

  “There’s still a bond between you all, you survivors of Barcelona, isn’t there? Gary’s OK. He’s probably wishing he could find a way to help you.”

  They agreed to talk this over more later. And Lily told him she was going to visit Lammockson’s Ark Three to meet Kristie. She offered Sanjay a ride.

  “I’d like that. Ark Three? I wonder what Nathan is up to now.”

  “You’ll see what there is to see. Not that he tells us anything.”

  He glanced at her. “You seem uncomfortable about it.”

  She thought it over.“I keep away from Nathan’s more baroque efforts. There’s something unbalanced about his super-tech projects. Obsessive, you know? Here he is trying to master the world through technology. While all around us…” She gestured at the gray ocean that rolled over the drowned remains of Lima.

  “I understand,” Sanjay said, thoughtful. “But maybe at such times as these we need big thinkers like Nathan Lammockson. Because for sure we need big solutions.” He grinned. “The insane as a last-resort evolutionary resource. But don’t tell Nathan I said that. I’d better go sign out with the COMRA crew. I’ll meet you at the helipad.”

  “Sure.” But as he turned away she called,“Incidentally, you said a Quechua group put some funding into the dive. What were they after?”

  “They guided a robot into the cathedral.” He grinned.“They brought up a coffin. Pizarro’s bones!”