Flood f-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Hammond just stood there, massaging one arm, his face crunched into a scowl. He looked as if he might be carrying some wound himself. Every so often he looked to the shore, back to where they had left Grace with Hammond’s unborn child.

  “Well, you did the right thing,” Lily said. She threw Nathan a bottle of water from the raft’s small emergency supply. He swigged down a big mouthful, and poured more over his head before handing it to Hammond. Lily winced a bit at the waste, but it wasn’t the time to make a fuss about that.

  She looked down at Piers. It was wet on the floor of the raft, but there was nowhere else to put him. She scrunched forward and took his head on her lap.

  Kristie sat staring at Piers’s pale, motionless face. “Maybe it’s best not to move him.”

  Hammond grunted. “Take a look under his life jacket.”

  Lily leaned forward, unzipped the jacket, and exposed a mess, Piers’s overalls and ripped flesh mingling in a pool of sticky blood. “Oh, God.”

  “Actually I think he got shot in the back,” Hammond said in a matter-of-fact way. “That looks like an exit wound to me.”

  “He went down fighting,” Nathan said. “Always knew he would.”

  “Is there a medic? Dr. Porter, or Doc Schmidt-anybody nearby?”

  “No idea,” Nathan said.“And I don’t see any way of finding out right now. Sorry, kid-you’re on your own.” Suddenly the steam seemed to go out of him. “Ah, Christ.” He folded up and sat down on the boat’s inflated hull, and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “We’ve got to go back in there, there are still people trying to get off the wreck. But I’m beat. Just give me a minute, son.”

  Hammond shrugged. As ever in the shadow of Nathan, he wasn’t about to go anywhere without his father.

  Lily glanced over at her niece. “Kris, the raft has a medical kit. Look, the zipper behind you. Can you pass it over?”

  Kristie sat for a long second, cradling her boy. Then she squirmed around to fetch the kit.“You don’t want to waste it. We don’t know how long it has to last, the stuff in there.”

  She was right, of course. With the Ark dying, with the crew unlikely to be allowed into Colorado, with even the New Jersey standing off, there was nowhere they could go, nowhere they could land-no place where they could ever get off this raft. But Lily put the thought aside. What else could you do?

  Kristie handed the kit over. Lily opened it.

  “No.” There was a touch on her wrist, cold and wet. It was Piers. His eyes open, he was looking up at her, his face upside down from her point of view, his mouth twisted with pain. It was as if a dead man had come to life.

  “Piers?”

  “Kristie is right.” His voice was a gurgle, indistinct, and the very act of breathing seemed to cause him pain. “You know it, and so do I. I’m sixty-five years old, for heaven’s sake.”

  “So am I.” Lily began to unroll a bandage.

  “Be sensible, Lily. That’s an order, by the way.”

  Lily forced a laugh.“I haven’t taken orders from you since Barcelona.”

  “Please. For me.”

  She hesitated. Then she pushed the box toward Nathan, with a nod. Surreptitiously, out of Piers’s eye line, Nathan prepared a syringe of morphine.

  Piers asked, “How is the ship, the crew?”

  “Well, we lost her.” Lily looked up. The ocean was littered with orange boats from the Ark. The shabbier-looking craft of the attackers moved through this crowd like shark fins, and small battles were going on everywhere. But Lily could see that one by one the attackers were withdrawing, and the Ark survivors were pulling on plastic ropes to bring their boats closer together. The Ark herself was sinking into a bubbling oil slick.

  She said,“I guess we got most of the people off. No way of counting right now.”

  Nathan jabbed the syringe into Piers’s leg, right through his pants. Piers didn’t seem to feel it. Covering, Nathan said, “We’ll count it up later, when the arseholes who did this have got what they wanted and pissed off. I hope they’re proud of themselves. They sent a fucking ship to the bottom of the sea, nuclear reactor and all. What a damn waste. A vessel that could have lasted decades yet, and all for a few scraps of wood and steel and plastic so they could make more of their shitty little rafts.”

  “The Americans,” Piers said softly. “The submarine. Couldn’t they help?”

  “They wouldn’t,” Lily said.“Thandie Jones did speak to the captain.”

  “They stay out of fights,” Nathan said.“That’s how you keep alive, for year after pointless year at sea. So much for the US Navy. Well. What’s done is done. I always knew this day could come, when we lost the Ark. Now it’s time for the next phase, is all.”

  Kristie asked, “What next phase?”

  Nathan gestured at the scum of debris.“Rafts, that’s what. Survival on the open sea. And the raw materials we need to do that are waiting for us, right over there.” He pointed back at the Ark. “We always arranged it so the stuff would just float off if we lost the ship suddenly. I’m talking about seaweed. Algae, gen-enged, by the boys in the Ark’s labs. From seaweed you can get algin, that is alginic acid, from which you can make emulsions, fibers… Construction material for rafts that will grow out of the sea, you just have to let it float there. You’ll see.” He stood up, and the raft rocked gently. “In the meantime we need to get back. Come on, boy.”

  He stood and strode away, back toward the center of the scatter of ships, the graveyard of his Ark, working his way across the cluster of rafts. Hammond followed reluctantly, wincing at the pain of his shoulder.

  “They wasted our water,” Kristie said. “Now we haven’t got a drop in this damn raft.”

  “There’ll be more water,” Lily said, but she was uncertain. “Maybe it will rain.”

  “No rain today,” Piers murmured. His eyes were wide, the pupils dilated, and he stared up at the sky. “Do you remember how it rained when we came out of the vault under that cathedral, how it rained in London…”

  “I remember.”

  Kristie grabbed the medical kit, closed it and stuck it back in the zippered compartment. Piers watched Kristie, tilting his head. He actually raised his arm, reaching out to her.

  “Come on, Kris,” Lily whispered. “Just hold his hand, just for a moment.”

  But Kristie turned her boy’s face away from the dying man.

  Piers lasted through the rest of the day, and into the night.

  As the light faded, Manco complained of thirst and hunger, but at last fell asleep. Kristie kept him in the shade of the cover, and soon it was too dark for Lily to make out either of them.

  Nathan didn’t come back to the raft. Lily just sat cradling Piers’s head. There was no moon, no cloud. The stars were extraordinary, set in a sky from which humankind’s pollution had all but washed out. Lily had spent years on a ship at sea, but even she had never seen the stars like this, for on the Ark there was always some nearby light or other to dazzle you.

  Around the raft there was quiet, broken only by the soft lapping of waves, a murmur of voices, somebody crying, far away. It was a night to rest, a night many no doubt wished would never end, for tomorrow a new struggle would begin. But for now there was stillness.

  Piers woke once more, in the dark. “Have you got it?”

  “Got what, Piers?”

  “For my face. You know. In case they come back.” He tried to shift, his hands lifting feebly. “It must have fallen on the floor.”

  “Your towel?”

  “Have you got it?”

  Kristie had a scarf around her neck that she used to keep the sun off. She took this off and passed it over. Lily smoothed it out and placed it over Piers’s face. He sighed, and lay still.

  93

  September 2043

  Kristie died.

  It was something she ate, something from the sea that wasn’t as familiar as it looked. It was a common way to die on the rafts. She was thirty-eight. She had survived
on the rafts two years since the sinking of the Ark.

  Manco, orphaned at aged twelve, was inconsolable.

  Kristie had kept her little pink kid’s backpack from London, and Lily went through it. Inside there were a few cheap plastic accessories, Kristie’s handheld computer, her ancient teddy. Lily decided to keep the handheld. She offered Manco the teddy, but it was too babyish for him. He kept a necklace of amberlike beads, however. He wore it wrapped around his wrist.

  There had been no peace between Kristie and her aunt, even to the end. When she learned what had happened at Cripple Creek, Kristie hadn’t been able to accept that Lily had wangled a place on Ark One, whatever it was, not for Manco, her own blood, but for Grace, a relic of her hostage days. It was no good for Lily to protest that they probably wouldn’t have taken Manco anyhow, and that Nathan certainly wouldn’t have supported him. Lily hadn’t even tried, and that was enough of a betrayal for Kristie.

  One way or another Lily’s captivity had come between them most of Kristie’s life, and now it pursued them to her death.

  That night, when Manco was sleeping, Lily took a look at the handheld.

  It had a calendar facility, but no satellite or radio link. And it had an extensive database that Kristie called her scrapbook. Lily remembered how she had started this thing on her mother’s dining table in Fulham, with an observation of an old man who couldn’t get to the football because of floods in Peterborough. That snippet was still here. She scanned through more items. They were selected judiciously, and written up with a hasty grace. Kristie could have been a writer of some kind, maybe a journalist, in a more forgiving age. In the last couple of years, after the Ark was gone and they were on the rafts, Kristie’s access to global news had pretty much vanished, aside from scraps she heard over Nathan’s clockwork radios. But her own world widened, oddly, as the raft communities crossing the world’s oceans converged and dissipated, and bits of news were passed on among them, and she had recorded them on her handheld.

  Curious, Lily scanned to the very last item Kristie had recorded. It was a bit of gossip, written up by Kristie a few weeks ago. The witness spoke of a time only a few months after Lily had deposited Grace in Colorado. She had been in the drifting communities in the ocean east of the Rockies. One night she had been sitting on her raft braiding her eldest daughter’s hair, when a light sent shifting shadows across her lap. At first she thought it was a flare. She turned to see.

  She made out a brilliant pinpoint of light that rose up into the western sky, trailing a column of smoke that was illuminated by the glow of that leading fire. As it rose it arced, tracing out a smooth curve across the face of the heavens. And then sound reached her, a soft rumble like a very distant storm. The spark of light receded in the sky.

  Grace, Lily thought immediately. Grace. What else could it be?

  Hastily she scanned the database. It was only a bit of gossip Kristie had picked up from somebody on another raft, who in turn had heard it from somebody else, who… And so on. It was unverifiable. The source didn’t even have a name. Lily was never going to know if it was true. She read the entry over and over, trying to squeeze more information out of its few words, until Manco called for her in his sleep.

  Later, spurred by curiosity, she looked up the second to last entry. It was a report out of what was left of America, relayed by radio, that the horse was believed to be extinct.

  In the morning Lily prepared the body as best she could. She stuffed the teddy inside the backpack, and slung the pack around Kristie’s neck.

  Then she got help carrying Kristie’s body to the edge of the raft. It was a big construct by now, nearly a hundred meters across, a floating village built on a substrate of Nathan’s gen-enged seaweed algin products. Aside from her pack, Kristie was sent naked into the sea. They couldn’t spare the clothes. At that they had to run a gauntlet of some of the raft crew, a younger set who didn’t believe in sea burials. There was no cannibalism, but Kristie’s body represented too valuable a resource to waste in the sea. That was their view, but Lily begged to differ, and as an elder from the Ark she wasn’t impeded.

  She didn’t even have anything to weigh down the body. Kristie’s grave would be the sharp teeth of the ocean.

  So Lily and Manco were left alone together. They were from different worlds, strangers. They fought and cried.

  94

  March 2044

  When the moon went into totality, when the Earth’s shadow crossed its face entirely and that compelling bloodred color bloomed, Lily could hear the gasp that went up across the community of rafts, a crowd’s murmur of awe, children saying, “Look at that!” in a variety of languages. The orange light of the eclipsed moon washed down over Manco’s upturned face, making it shine like a coin. As the sky was stripped of moonlight the other stars emerged, dominated by Jupiter, king of the planets.

  Lily tried to imagine how it would be to look back from the moon itself, to see the breast of Earth’s ocean glimmering in the tainted moonlight, unbounded from pole to pole save for the last scattering of mountaintop islands with its speckling of rafts and boats and islands of garbage, and the people turning up their faces to see the show in the sky. Lily felt like relaxing into the spectacle herself.

  But she had work to do, information to drum into the thirteen-year-old head of Manco.

  She shifted to get more comfortable beside Manco on the scrap of plastic tarp, salvaged from the Ark, that they spread out over the sticky seaweed-algin floor of their raft. “Now, Manco, you need particularly to watch out for the moments when the Earth’s shadow touches the moon’s limb, which is when the moon enters or leaves the cone of shadow. Because you can time those moments precisely, you see, within a second or so.” She made an entry in Kristie’s handheld, to make the point.“And then you note down the time, like this-”

  “The light’s funny,” he said. “Not like moonlight at all.”

  “No. That’s because it isn’t normal moonlight. You get moonlight when the sun’s light shines on the face of the moon. During an eclipse the only light the moon gets is refracted through the Earth’s atmosphere. It comes around the edge of the Earth, and it’s red. Like all the sunrises and sunsets in the world, all at once, falling on the moon…”

  He wasn’t interested.

  And her voice was giving up on her. She was thirsty. God, she was sixty-eight years old, and for three years she had been living on a raft, and the plastic buckets had stood empty for long days. She had a right to a sore throat. You could always get a little moisture from the fish, from sucked-out eyeballs or spinal fluid, which kids like Manco seemed to have no problem with. But it always made Lily queasy, and left behind a salty, oily aftertaste that was almost worse than the thirst itself.

  She tried to focus.

  She was trying to drum into Manco’s young head the method she had figured out for calculating longitude.

  Because precise timekeeping was essential, figuring out longitude would be a challenge in the future when all the watches and clocks had stopped working. But she had her old astronomy almanac, a souvenir of the New Jersey, which had timing predictions of lunar eclipses as seen from Greenwich for every year until 2100. A lunar eclipse was an event visible from across one whole face of the planet. All you had to do was keep track of the date-she knew from Kristie’s handheld that tonight was 13 March 2044-and if you spotted your moment of eclipse, and pinned it down to the right prediction in the almanac, you knew the precise Greenwich time at that moment. And knowing that you just had to look at the stars above you, and figure out how they compared to the position of the stars the almanac showed for that moment in the skies over London, and you could tell how far around the curve of the world you were…

  Even to Lily it felt terribly complicated.

  “I don’t see what difference it makes,” Manco said. “Longitude, yes, OK, how far we are from the equator-”

  “Latitude,” she said softly. “That’s latitude. Longitude is-”

&nb
sp; “Latitude’s easy.” He pointed at the pole star. “It just depends how high that is. And latitude’s important.” So it was. It was best to stay close to the equator, where the great hurricanes rarely roamed, but you would always venture north or south a little way, because where the hurricanes passed the water was stirred up, and the fishing was better. “But who cares about longitude? What difference does it make? It’s all the same, it’s just water, no matter how far east or west you go. I mean, where are we right now?”

  “About seventy-five degrees east. Somewhere in the Indian Ocean.”

  “So what? Who cares? What’s Indian?”

  “India. It was called India. The point is-”

  “Can I go see Ana? I’ll tell her about the eclipse, and latitude and stuff.”

  “Longitude.”

  “Whatever.”

  And with that off he went, walking gracefully, wearing only a ragged pair of shorts. He padded over the raft’s floor, thinking nothing of Nathan’s marvelous substrate, an everyday, self-maintaining miracle that everybody took for granted, and most of the young didn’t remotely understand, or even notice.

  At the edge Manco slipped into the moonlit water and swam away.

  She heard Nathan’s cough long before he came looming out of the dark.

  Nathan came up, hobbling; in the last few years he had become plagued with arthritis, blaming the damp of the sea. “Where the hell’s Manco? I thought school was in.”

  Lily smoothed out a heap of blankets for him to sit on; he lowered himself painfully. “Oh, Nathan, you know how it is with these kids. You can’t keep them still. Ana isn’t a bad kid, anyhow. Have you met her parents? Russians, who made it to the western US after the flooding overwhelmed the mother country. Tough story. Ana doesn’t remember any of it, of course.”

  “My perception is these kids just want to swim and screw all day. Some of them catch fish with their teeth, y’know. Hell of a sight.”