Flood f-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “Welcome to the madhouse, more like,” she snapped, hungover, grieving.

  “We must each make our judgment about that.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m functioning.”

  “Most of the time, that is all one can hope for,” Piers said dryly. “Come on. The VIP experience…”

  They found their way to a grand staircase that punched through the upper decks like an elevator shaft in a mine. They climbed up to the very top deck. This was the smallest in area; the boat’s upper levels were tiered in a stepped effect.

  The bridge was up here, a roomy pillbox with tinted picture windows. Around the feet of three towering red funnels utilitarian buildings clustered, like a small industrial facility. Radar dishes turned silently. Over their heads were big solar panels that could be tipped and tilted independently, like the slats of a Venetian blind; their upper surfaces sparkled in the sun.

  Lily walked to the edge of the deck and looked toward the shore. They were only half a kilometer, less, from where the water lapped around the rooftops of Chosica. She could hear gunfire, but the battle that had accompanied the Ark’s impromptu departure was already over. Some of the offshore rafts drifted close to the Ark, and a few small powerboats buzzed back and forth on the water, probing, but, deterred no doubt by the Ark’s armory, none came near the ship.

  Piers saw her looking. “Nathan has an impressive arsenal on board. We shouldn’t be bothered by that shower.”

  “Those people built the ship for Nathan, and now they’re to be abandoned.”

  Piers shrugged. “They were paid. Fed and housed, for years. You know there’s little point debating the ethics of such things. These are ruthless times, Lily.” They walked on.

  Piers looked as if he belonged here, oddly, on this reincarnated 1930s cruise liner. He had always had a David Niven look about him, like a relic from a more elegant age. He showed no sign of the traumas of yesterday, the battle that might so easily have ended in his own death, the fact that he had killed a man. She wondered how much of it showed in her own face.

  Piers said this level was called the sports deck. “Once you actually would have found chaps playing sports here, deck tennis and so forth. Not now, though. The space is too useful for other things.

  “However Nathan has made every effort to build a ship that emulates the Cunard Queen Mary as closely as possible-that is, the ship as she was launched in 1936. She served as a troop carrier during the Second World War and was gutted; the restoration after the war differed in some details. But this is obviously a modern vessel-really a facsimile of the old Queen Mary, built with modern methods and materials, features like a self-healing coating on the hull and propellers to minimize the need for dry dock.”

  “And a nuclear power plant in the engine room,” she said. “Or so I’ve heard.”

  “Well, quite. Scavenged by Nathan from a nuclear submarine.” He gazed up at the three red funnels, his hands shielding his eyes. “Even those beauties are just for show.”

  “And the solar panels?”

  “Designed to fold away neatly in the event of a storm. Nathan is planning to stick mostly to tropical waters, so there will be plenty of sun. Should enable us to eke out our uranium supplies that much longer, always assuming resupply will be difficult.”

  “Resupply? What kind of world does Nathan think he’s living in, that he’s going to be sailing around in a cruise liner buying up uranium stocks? And why build a mock-up of the damn Queen Mary in the first place? This is all unreal, Piers.”

  He eyed her. “Is it?”

  They went down a staircase to the sun deck. Here they followed a broad walkway around the edge of the deck. Lifeboats were suspended over their heads. The boats’ keels were white, but they were a thoroughly modern design, with bright orange Kevlar superstructures, first-aid boxes and robust-looking electric motors. They passed a gymnasium, and a squash court.

  “A squash court! Jesus Christ, Piers.”

  “Well, we’re going to need exercise. Nathan has been careful to restrict the numbers on board. Three thousand in total, two thousand passengers, a thousand crew. You’ll get a chance to use the court. We’ll figure out a booking system.”

  “You’re laughable, you know that, Piers? After all that’s happened to us you’re talking about squash. Laughable.”

  “Maybe we could run a squash ladder,” he said mildly.

  At the stern of the ship, on this deck, was a restaurant. It was elegantly styled, its exterior wall a white-painted sweep, and glancing inside she saw an array of tables and a dance floor, all curves and wood panels and chrome. But it was only half-finished, the tables covered in dust sheets, the floor unpolished, a mural of dancing figures on the wall incomplete.

  “This is the verandah grill,” Piers said. “A feature of the old ship, a place to see and be seen. Nathan put a lot of effort into re-creating it.”

  “I don’t think I packed my fucking ball gown.”

  “Gowns will be provided. You know Nathan. He likes to realize his dreams in every detail.”

  “Nathan was born in the Thames estuary. What does he know about 1930s cruise liners?”

  “He’s allowed to dream, I suppose,” Piers said. “Cats looking at kings and so forth.”

  They descended a flight of stairs to the promenade deck. Another wooden walkway ran around the circumference of this deck, Piers said, a half-kilometer in length. Lily eyed it up as a running track. They went indoors and wandered through huge chambers. The “cabin-class lounge” was a vast, ornate room with the feel of a hotel lobby. It was dominated by a giant frieze showing two unicorns locked in elegant combat. Doors led off to a ballroom, all gilt and silver and a parquet floor, a bar, and a “smoking room,” as Piers called it, a kind of fantasia of a London club, with wood paneling, a domed ceiling-and a fireplace.

  “Unbelievable,” Lily said. “I mean, where are we going to get the wood to burn in that fireplace?”

  “Ah, but that’s hardly the point. Even the fire will be a facsimile.”

  They passed on through an observation lounge and a drawing room, half-finished shells but nonetheless crammed with detail. The observation lounge seemed attractive to Lily, a room whose curving design fitted its function. The drawing room was overwhelmed by a portrait of a Madonna and Child, a simulacrum of a work commissioned for the original ship; the Virgin was haloed by compass points, and stood amid navigational instruments.

  The ship was big enough, but you couldn’t walk far before coming to a wall or a rail, and it was already starting to feel stuffy to Lily, enclosing, static. And its unfinished opulence seemed unreal after her bloody experiences of yesterday. And yet for all the surreality here they were, aboard Nathan’s extraordinary ship, once more living inside his dreams, just as in the Andes.

  They went back to the staircase well and descended further, hurrying down through the main deck, and decks A and B-the lower decks went down to G before you got to the machinery rooms, holds and stores in the belly of the ship. They paused on C deck, and Piers brought her to the restaurant, a tremendous room with a dome set in a towering ceiling. It was divided by columns into a nave and side aisles, like a church. One wall was dominated by a huge decorative map of the Atlantic. But a side door opened to reveal a glimpse of a shabby, stuffy-looking kitchen, and a Quechua girl hurried through laden with a sack of rice.

  “This was once the largest public enclosed space afloat,” Piers said. “Large enough on its own to have held all three of Columbus’s pioneering transatlantic ships. Imagine that! There’s a swimming pool on D deck below. And a Turkish bath, next to the hospital-”

  “Enough, Piers. Jesus!”

  “The use of the ship is certain to evolve. We have time to work it out. The ship herself will be rebuilt as we sail. We have facilities to handle that too.”

  “Rebuilt? What about raw materials?”

  He smiled.“You’ll see. One of Nathan’s surprises. Our position is clea
r, however you feel about it.” He raised his hands.“This is our world-this ship, the sea she sails on and the air, and whatever we can extract from those resources, this is all we have. And in such a closed world there are rules to be obeyed, if we are to survive.”

  “Control our population growth, for instance.”

  “Well, quite. And now we can begin the job of defining those rules.” “You’re going to enjoy that, aren’t you? Working out how people should live.”

  “Somebody has to take the lead,” he murmured.

  Studying him, she saw again the paradox in him. He was the one who had arguably coped worst with Barcelona. Now here he was nineteen years later, aged fifty-nine, actually relishing a new confinement. It was like a neurotic wish-fulfillment, Lily thought, the captive returning to his cage, this time as captor.

  “You know, this ship is everything I thought it would be. Insane. A grandiose folly. This is why I stayed away from Nathan’s mad project all these years.”

  “Wait until you hear what Nathan has to say about it himself,” he replied mildly. “And wait until the fitting-out is finished. I think you’ll be impressed.” He glanced at his watch.“Come on. We don’t want to be late for the boss’s party.”

  74

  Nathan’s maiden-voyage party was held on an open area at one end of the sun deck, where a big helipad H had been painted. Waiters circulated, doling out glasses of champagne. Lily took one and sipped. She was no fan of champagne, but it was a novelty nowadays to say the least. Something in the fizz, the alcohol, seemed to ease her lingering hangover from the mini-bar gin. From here Lily was able to look back at the ship, at its rising stepped decks and that row of ornate funnels. It was like a mixture of an aging hotel and a half-finished shopping mall. It was hard to believe she was really here, floating away on this thing, and that she was perhaps doomed to spend the months and years of the rest of her life on this ship.

  The party was small, restricted to Nathan’s closest companions. So here were Lily and Piers, and his closest aides like Juan Villegas. Villegas wore black today; his partner Amanda had died only yesterday, and he cast a regretful glance at Lily. Her sister could have done a lot worse, Lily thought, not for the first time; Villegas really had cared for Amanda.

  Grace Gray stood by Villegas. She wore a trim white dress. She showed no interest in her surroundings. Even when her gaze passed over Lily there was no recognition. Lily felt a stab of anxiety, a premonition of guilt. She had sworn to keep Grace from harm. Was that promise already being violated, just by her having been brought here?

  And there was Hammond Lammockson, looking even more uncomfortable. He kept his eyes downcast, his hands bunched in fists. He actually wore a suit, as did his father, and you could see a superficial resemblance between them, but Hammond was stockier, darker. At least he wasn’t cuffed, but two burly-looking AxysCorp guards stood behind him. Lily wondered uneasily what Nathan planned for him today.

  Nathan chimed a glass and cleared his throat. “Thanks for coming. Not that you had a choice.” It was one of his characteristically disconcerting sallies aimed at those dependent on him, and there was a nervous murmur in response. “I got to tell you first we’ve had some news, relayed from Denver. We’re not the only ones who have been at war. Jerusalem has gone, drowned. Of course most of it was ruins by now anyway, but yesterday the sea closed over it. So that’s the end of the war of Abraham, and all the wars over Jerusalem I guess, wars going back to the Romans, a war extinguished by the sea as a rising tide puts out a camp fire on a beach.

  “That’s the way it’s going to happen now, all over the world. The water level is rising at somewhere over a hundred meters a year. A hundred meters! That’s going to put enormous pressure on human societies. Governments and corporations and cultures will crack and crumble under the strain.

  “And that’s why I built this ship,” he said, pacing. “First of all as a refuge. This was always meant to be a place we could live if we ever got kicked out of the Andes. Well, we’ve achieved that so far, haven’t we?

  “But I have other objectives. I want to bring hope.” He waved a hand at the deck, the funnels rising above them. “I saw the old Queen Mary as a boy, concreted to her wharf at Long Beach. For all I know she’s still there now, trapped and drowned under the sea. I fell in love with the old girl immediately.”

  So that’s it, Lily thought. Nostalgia for a boyhood adventure.

  “And that’s why I brought her back now, in this new form. The Queen Mary was the culmination of a shipbuilding tradition in Britain that went back to Brunel and beyond. People were fascinated by her, by her construction, her launch, her feats, the records she set. She was a technological triumph, a moon rocket of her day. And she was beautiful, a marriage of art and engineering, a synthesis we lost somewhere along the way.

  “And that’s why I wanted to build a fine ship to sail out of here on, not just some tub, another shabby raft. Every other damn ocean liner has long run out of gas and been turned into a floating refugee center. The Queen Mary represents the pinnacle of her age, the technological civilization that spawned us. Now she’s back, and she’s underway, although I was hoping to wait another year so she could be launched on her centenary, but there you go. And as we sail around the globe I want her to represent hope in the minds of those who see her, an aspiration of civilization presented to all those ratty raft communities on the water and the drowning refugees on the land, hope that beauty like this can be brought back into being someday in the future when this damn flood lets us all go.”

  “I’m trying not to laugh,” Lily whispered to Piers.

  “You’ve always been skeptical of Nathan’s ambition,” Piers murmured. “Just remember-”

  “I’m on his boat. I know, I know.”

  And now Nathan came to his final motive for building the boat.

  “She’s for my son,” he said, without looking around at Hammond. “For all I know my only surviving relative. The repository of my genes, and my dreams.” Now he turned to Hammond, who glowered back. “I did it all for you, Hammond. It was always for you, you know that. Even when I denied you, or turned from you, or punished you, or spoke to you harshly, it was all for your own good. I spent my life telling you so. You understand that in your heart, don’t you?”

  Hammond glowered back.

  “But you betrayed me.” Nathan spoke softly. Everybody on deck was so silent now that every word rang out clearly. “You allied with my enemies, that fool Ollantay. You let them into Project City. Your actions resulted in the smashing up of what it took me twenty years to build. But you know what I have to do? I have to forgive you. Kneel before me, son.”

  Hammond didn’t move. Lily saw his hands flexing, his big muscles working.

  Nathan nodded to his guards. One of them produced a nightstick and whipped the back of Hammond’s legs. He grunted with the pain, and his legs folded up, spilling him into a clumsy kneeling posture. The guards stepped behind him and grabbed his shoulders, holding him down in the kneel.

  “Before you all,” Nathan said, “before my closest friends here, you must purge yourself, son. I have to hear you apologize, in public, in full.” He smiled.“If you come back to me, you will have everything. All I own when I die. A princess to carry on my genes-our genes-through her children.” And here he glanced oddly at Grace. A faint alarm bell rang in Lily’s head.

  “But I do have my authority to maintain. If you persist in your betrayal you’re no use to me, and it’s the fishes for you, son.” He glanced out to sea. “So what’s it to be? Love or hate? Life or death?”

  Hammond tried to look away, but a guard grabbed his chin and tipped his head up. Father and son locked gazes. It was an extraordinary moment, Lily thought, pure primate drama.

  Hammond cracked first. “Very well,” he hissed, his jaw clamped by the guard’s grip.

  “What was that?” Nathan gestured for the guard to release his mouth.

  “Very well. I apologize. I apologize for
my betrayal. You win.”

  “Yes, I do, don’t I?” Nathan grinned and stood back.

  The guards released Hammond. He slumped forward, rubbing the back of his legs.

  Nathan turned. “Now that’s done and we’re a family again, we can get on with our cruise. The cruise of a lifetime, ha!..”

  Lily felt rather than heard the engines start up, a deep thrumming that came vibrating through the decks. Glancing at the shore, she saw it begin to slide away, as the Ark pushed itself through the water under its own power. The ship’s whistle sounded, a deep bass note like a whale’s bellow. Birds flew up in a cloud from drowning Chosica.

  Nathan raised his glass, and a ripple of applause broke out among his friends.

  Hammond got slowly to his feet.

  75

  December 2035

  From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

  The first scrapbook entry Kristie made during the voyage of Ark Three was on Christmas Day 2035, the first Christmas at sea. Until then she hadn’t been able to bear to touch her handheld, not since the death of Ollantay and her mother on that calamitous day in August.

  But Nathan made an effort for Christmas, with a big party for the ship’s children in the restaurant, hundreds of them. And then Kristie gave Manco his own little party in their cabin, with seashell-paper streamers and a toy Inca warrior she had made herself, a doll knitted from the vicuna wool of their old clothes. She let Lily see her great-nephew too. Lily brought sweets. Kristie recorded some of this, for Manco’s sake in the future. It seemed churlish not to.

  But she caught Lily looking at the handheld, and her old pink backpack that she had brought from London and had later risked her neck to retrieve from under the nose of Wayne in Dartmoor.

  The backpack and its contents meant a lot to Kristie in a way she wasn’t comfortable thinking about. Her little bag of souvenirs was a last link to her own deepest past. And she had brought it with her into Cusco, on that fateful August day. Why would she have done that if she hadn’t already sensed, on some deep level, that that day would mean another break with the past? She suspected Lily was mulling over the same ideas.