Flood f-1

by Stephen Baxter

  At last Ark Three sailed into the heart of Switzerland.

  The Ark came to anchor somewhere over the flooded remains of Geneva. The northwest of the country was now dominated by a salt-water merger of the old Lake Neuchatel and Lake Geneva, itself just another bay of the hugely extended North Sea.

  A shore party was to be taken to meet federal and canton government agencies in a mountainside community called New Geneva. Set well above the waterline, this was a temporary site, tents and houses of clapboard and corrugated iron, but nevertheless was a functioning city. The Swiss were in a position to deal with Nathan and his offers of trade. Some of the cantons in the mountainous regions had not been directly touched by the flooding at all, and the Swiss had quickly organized themselves to keep at bay the waves of hungry refugees who had come flooding from the lowlands of Germany, France and Italy. Nathan intended that the Swiss should be treated as valuable long-term trading partners. He even intended to put forward a proposal for the Ark to do some deep-sea mining on the Swiss’s behalf.

  Lily wasn’t in the official party, but she did get the chance to go ashore briefly. After eight months at sea it felt very odd to stand on land, not to feel the world swaying under your feet. The lake was a mirror, deep blue, surrounded by mountains that stretched into the distance, still sharp and vivid, even if they had lost much of the snow that had once coated their lower slopes. If you hadn’t known Switzerland before, Lily reflected, you’d never know that anything was wrong in this scene, that anything had changed, that beneath the waters of this brilliant lake whole cities lay rotting.

  And before this backdrop the Ark floated on the water like a toy, gleaming in the brilliant clear sunlight. The ship looked at her best today, with those stacked decks and the bright paintwork of the funnels reflected in the water. With typical showmanship Nathan had had the superstructure draped with fluttering flags. It was at moments like this that Lily glimpsed the insane genius of Nathan’s vision. In this drowned-out world from which so many of mankind’s achievements had been erased, the Ark looked like a visitor from another age, not an ocean-going ship but a time machine.

  Piers was the de facto leader of the shore party. But Nathan put his son Hammond into a suit and tie and sent him along too. This was part of Nathan’s slow wooing-back of his estranged son, after the betrayal and humiliation of a year ago. Lily thought that Hammond was coming to an accommodation with his father. But a grain of bitterness was lodged in Hammond for good, like a bit of seed between his teeth.

  She was more disturbed by Nathan’s order, on this trip, that Grace should accompany Hammond.

  Nathan clearly wanted Hammond to take a woman, to start a family. It was entirely self-interest. Nathan thought a suitable relationship would domesticate Hammond, as well as providing a conduit for Nathan’s genes to pass to the future. Hammond had rejected the candidates Nathan had produced so far. But since the beginning of the voyage, Nathan had had his eye on Grace Gray. She did have Saudi royal blood. And maybe it was a way, for him, of uniting two of his pet projects, his son and the loose family of former hostages he had been sheltering for two decades. And Hammond, Lily could see, didn’t mind the idea of having Grace at all.

  But Grace wanted nothing to do with Hammond. She had emerged from her peculiar life in Walker City reclusive, withdrawn, and, Lily thought, almost certainly a virgin. When she was forced to be with Hammond, earthy and grasping, she retreated even further into herself.

  Lily didn’t like to oppose Nathan, or even Hammond. But she felt a duty of care to Grace. She tried to talk about this to Piers. He was much more of a politician than Lily would ever be, and would say only that things were “complicated.”

  She couldn’t see what harm Grace could come to on this trip, however, as she and Hammond were going to be out in public the whole time they were together. She returned to the ship and got on with her own job, her concern about Grace niggling quietly at the back of her mind.

  Then, twenty-four hours after he had gone ashore, Piers called her. Grace had done a runner, and disappeared into New Geneva. “Lily, it sounds as if she’s been waiting for the chance to get away from Hammond. The trouble is, if the Swiss find her before we do they’ll throw her in the lake. They have very tough laws about refugees.”

  “I’ll be there,” Lily said, and she folded up the phone. “Shit, shit.”

  Grace was found quickly by the Swiss, and handed over to the Ark crew.

  They spent months on the extended Lake Geneva, trading, training, refurbishing the ship. Throughout that time Grace was restricted to the Ark, and watched by AxysCorp guards, and Lily remembered Barcelona.

  78

  June 2037

  From Geneva, the Ark cautiously crossed to the head of the Danube at Donaueschingen. From here the navigators guided the ship east along the track of the drowned river valley through southern Germany and Austria, crossing the sites of Ulm, Regensburg, Linz and Vienna. Each city was marked by the usual scum of garbage and bloated corpses, and by a cluster of starveling raft communities who competed with the seagulls for scraps. It was a sorry end for Europe, Lily thought. Nathan gradually tightened security on the ship. He ordered that the city sites be given a wide berth, and he set up a twenty-four-hour armed patrol of the promenade deck. Any boat parties sent to the high ground went heavily armed. The mood aboard became tense, fearful, fretful.

  It was a relief when the Ark crossed the site of Budapest, and ran south over the lower ground of the Hungarian plain. The cities here, deeply drowned, left no sign of their existence on the surface of the placid sea. Beyond Belgrade the Ark had to pass through a relatively narrow valley where the Danube traced the Romanian border. Communities of some kind survived in the Carpathians to the north, as you could see from rising threads of smoke, but there was no response to Nathan’s radio hails.

  By now, nearly two years after leaving Chosica, the ship was accumulating problems. The OTEC, the aquaculture experiments, even the sea-concrete plants proved cumbersome and problematic, and the ship’s limited factories could never keep up with the demand for spare parts. Without the spares they had picked up in Switzerland many systems would already have failed, Lily judged. Even so the ship’s systems had had to be cannibalized, internal partitions ripped out for repairs to the hull and the major bulkheads. The ship started to have a shabby, decaying look.

  The Ark came through a broad valley in what had been Walachia, and sailed beyond the scummy patch of debris that marked the site of Bucharest. Once they had passed the old coast of the Black Sea, Nathan had the ship anchor, and launched a review of every aspect of the ship’s operations.

  During the refit the onboard debate about the ship’s future intensified. The big main restaurant was used for weekly “parliaments,” as Nathan called them, where anybody could raise any issue they were concerned about. At these sessions Juan Villegas was the most senior of those who challenged Nathan’s unmodified fundamentalist vision of the future.

  “Let us be realistic, Nathan,” Villegas said. “Our needs are elemental. Fresh, land-grown vegetables. Seeds if we can obtain them. Topsoil, even. Basic supplies of all kinds. And whatever we can get to refurbish the ship.”

  “No. You know my philosophy, Juan,” Nathan said.“If we go back to sucking on the teat of the land the first chance we get, we’ll never wean ourselves off it. What we need is people. Engineers, biologists, doctors. Visionaries to drive forward the great project of independence.”

  “We can’t eat vision! Dreams don’t float! And we do not need more people. We need the precise opposite. We need less. We must find ways to offload crew. You have seen the figures, the way our basic supply is not keeping up with our internal demand…” He produced a twenty-year-old handheld and began scrolling through tables. But Nathan wouldn’t focus on the results. Villegas grew steadily angrier.

  In their time at sea, once he had got over his own shock at the events surrounding the abandonment of Project City, Villegas had grown in seniority a
mong the barons around Nathan. Lily wondered if in some way his relationship with Amanda had actually been holding him back in Project City. Now Lily saw the insight and decisiveness that must have made Villegas his preflood fortune in the first place.

  But at the same time his view of the ship and its crew, their mission and their needs, was diverging from Nathan’s. Villegas wanted the voyage to end as soon as possible, before some terminal accident befell them, as surely it eventually would. Nathan wanted it never to end at all. As time went on their differences were becoming overwhelming. Villegas and Nathan were like two dinosaurs, Lily thought, the last of their kind confronting each other. After one of these parliamentary sessions turned into a near-riot, Nathan had his loyal AxysCorp cops man the stage with him, their sidearms visible.

  It was typical of Nathan that in his heart of hearts he was developing a compromise. Lily, still in his inner circle if only because of Grace, detected this shift in small hints, the tone of his conversation, subtexts of briefings he asked to be prepared. He was not about to give up on his dream of a floating city, but he was starting to accept that in the short term at least he was going to need support from the shore. But it was also typical of Nathan that he shared none of this evolution in his thinking with his most senior officer and most significant challenger, Juan Villegas.

  Lily had her own subplots to deal with, meanwhile.

  A day came when Grace refused to eat. Lily was twisted with guilt. She’d told Grace how she’d used hunger strikes against the Fathers of the Elect, in her Barcelona dungeons. She herself had put the idea into Grace’s head. Now here was Grace, held hostage in another floating cell, under pressure from Nathan, doing exactly that.

  But Nathan wasn’t about to be beaten by a mere suicide threat. He threatened to have his doctors force-feed Grace, if that was what it would take to keep her alive. Lily spent a lot of time with Grace, trying to find a way through this mess, a way to have her come down of her own accord.

  The sea-level rise topped a kilometer, another ghastly and unwelcome landmark. There were surges and lulls, but it still showed no signs of slowing from Thandie’s doubling-every-five-years exponential increase. Nobody talked about this hard fact, however.

  The Ark sailed south over Istanbul and the Sea of Marmara, and through the Dardanelles to the Aegean. From there she passed over Suez and along the course of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

  Then she turned northeast to cross India, following the river valleys, heading for the frontier with Nepal. Much of India was deeply submerged, but nowhere was free of detritus, the slicks of oil, the islands of indestructible plastic garbage slowly spinning in the torpid currents, and the bodies, bloated and naked, that floated up like balloons from the rotting ruins below. Billions had once lived here; billions must have died.

  Lily found it a great relief when land was sighted on the northern horizon, the foothills of the Himalayas, their summits brown and jagged. They had reached Nepal.

  79

  Landing craft from the Ark took ashore one of the ship’s hydrogen-fueled armored trucks, and Lily was driven in toward Kathmandu with Nathan, Piers and a few AxysCorp goons. Villegas was left in executive command of the ship.

  They drove along tight, winding roads that climbed into green-clad hills. In small, crowded villages, people watched apathetically as they passed. Every so often the view would open up, and Lily glimpsed the higher peaks to the north. But these summits did not gleam white as they used to in picture postcards; now the brown streak of bare rock scarred the mountains’ faces all the way to their peaks.

  Before they got to Kathmandu they were stopped at a military perimeter. Serious-looking hardware peered down at them from watch towers. A polite young man in an orange tunic introduced himself. He was a representative of Prasad Deuba, Nathan’s contact here. He apologized for the inconvenience of the security. Tense negotiations ensued, led by Piers.

  Lily stayed in the truck and kept out of it. The Nepalese guards stared in at her, their faces hard, blank. Their drill looked competent, the way they held their weapons assured. Lily recalled that the Gurkhas, a main-stay of the British army for decades, had come from Nepal. Evidently the training and tradition had rubbed off. But some of these young men bore facial scars that looked like radiation burns.

  In the end a deal was done. The AxysCorp troopers were not made to give up their weapons, but they had to proceed under armed guard. So they drove on, with silent Gurkha-type troops sitting composed in the rear of the truck, their own weapons cradled in their uniformed arms, and they were tailed by a couple of Nepalese army jeeps.

  Kathmandu, when they reached it, astonished Lily. It was a sprawling city that had once hosted a million souls, and might still do so now-a major conurbation that had been more than fourteen hundred meters above sea level. And on the skyline the profile of the higher mountains loomed, still the highest in the world. Deuba’s polite young man acted like a tourist guide now, and pointed out memorable sights. Streets that ran between delicate pagodas were crowded with pedestrians, cyclists and peculiar three-wheeled motor cars. Holy men still lived in their ashram near the great temple complex by the river, and on the opposite bank families still gathered around the greasy smoke of the funeral pyres.

  But the place had evidently become astonishingly rich. In among the temples, Hindu and Buddhist, were modern buildings, glass-fronted office blocks and villas, sprawling private residences behind tall automatic gates. The people in the streets, their features delicately Indian, wore expensive-looking clothes. Even the beggars squatting in the road, their hands held out for food as the truck passed, wore fine clothes, if dusty. Some of them even wore jewelry that glinted at their necks.

  “But you can’t eat diamonds,” said the young guide.

  They passed a residence of the King, guarded by carved stone elephants. A band played in the street.

  “Fuck me,” said Nathan. “Bagpipes!”

  Prasad Deuba, Nathan’s business contact, welcomed them to his home. It was actually a complex of new buildings, a grand villa at the heart of the old city. Lily thought its fortifications looked more formidable than had the country’s border’s. Deuba fed them tea and cake, British style, and offered them a yak’s-milk liqueur. “Very rare and valuable, now that the Russians have eaten all the yaks!”

  “I bet you managed to turn a profit even out of that, Prasad, you old dog,” Nathan said with an admiring growl. He said to his companions, “You’d be lucky to get out of a deal with Prasad with a shirt on your back.”

  Deuba smiled, but Lily saw his eyes remained cold. He wasn’t going to be fooled by a little flattery.

  Prasad Deuba had clearly been a businessman, in the old days. Aged around sixty, he had the expansive gestures, quick smile and penetrating stare of a salesman. He wore a western-style suit, very well kept, and his hair was gelled flat against his scalp. His accent was smooth, almost British. He had been sent to England for his education.

  Nathan made his pitch. By now he was not looking for trading partners, as in the deals he had struck in Switzerland. What he wanted, he said, was sanctuary.

  “Look, Prasad, you can see how we’re fixed. Ark Three-you must come and see her, you’d be my honored guest, we put on a hell of a dinner in the restaurant-”

  Deuba inclined his head. “It would be my pleasure.”

  “She’s a fine ship, and she might last years, decades. But maybe not forever. We need shore support. I accept that.” He waved a hand at Deuba’s villa, the reception room they sat in, expensively furnished, servants standing silently in the corners. “And I can’t think of a better place than this, a better partner than you. What I need from you is a liaison with your government, those Maoists who run your country now. We have a lot to offer.” He began running through the Ark’s assets, the nuke plant, the pioneering OTEC and manufacturing gear: the ship was a floating city full of the latest technological sophistication.“And then there are the people, my engineers and doctors and
craftsmen and sailors-”

  Deuba held up his hand.“My question is simple. It is the only datum the government would ask of you. How many are you?”

  Piers said evenly, “Three thousand. That includes a non-productive percentage, the elderly, the very young, the disabled, the ill. I can give you precise figures.”

  Deuba nodded. “ Three thousand,” he said mournfully. “You have seen our ever-changing shoreline, where the rafts of the dispossessed cluster like seaweed.”

  “The Ark is no raft,” Nathan said, irritation growing.

  But Deuba spoke to them of what had become of his country. “Nathan, you must understand our situation.

  “It started even before most of us knew of the existence of the flood: a slow trickle of refugees coming across the border from India. Not that we would have called them refugees then. They were rich people, coming from India’s coastal cities, and they had access to the best science data and predictions. They knew what was coming. They sought to escape the regional wars and the disruption of the flooding in the short term, and to preserve their own comfortable lives in the longer term. They came here with money, intent on buying property and land in our higher provinces. Those who sold them land quickly grew rich too. I admit I saw the straws in the wind earlier than most. I bought up a good deal of land for a pittance, before selling it on to rich Indians for a healthy profit. The result was a last explosion of twenty-first-century affluence, a building spree in this city. A country that had been one of the poorest in the world actually became, for a brief interval, one of the richest, per capita. All because of its altitude. I myself used my wealth to buy and reinforce this place, my fortress.”

  “You were wise.”

  “Yes. Because then the trickle became a stream, as those of lesser means came pouring in. The middle classes, I suppose you would say, of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They too handed over their wealth for a place in this scrap of a country of ours. Many more grew rich, at least in paper and credit and gold, but gave up their most precious possession, in return, their own land.