Stephen Baxter: Flood

“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.

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.

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…