Stephen Baxter - Flood

A camera viewpoint pulled back to reveal long lines of refugees, their clothes the color of mud, plodding through knee-high water in search of dry land. There were enormous numbers of them, adults and children, in this one shaky shot. More advanced areas were not spared: a failed embankment had turned an airport into a lake, with helicopters and military aircraft piled on top of each other. Lily couldn’t tell from the commentary if some kind of storm had hit, a typhoon; it sounded as if the sea had simply risen, relentlessly, to do this damage.

And now, as if the viewpoint pulled back further still, the news program switched to a summary map of the world that showed the shapes of the continents outlined in bright blue, all around the shorelines and in the major river estuaries. The blue was a graphic showing how flooding emergencies were cropping up everywhere, in the Americas, north and south Europe, India, Asia, Africa, Australia. Whole low-lying regions were threatened too, like Bangladesh, Florida, Louisiana, the Netherlands, and river deltas, many densely populated. In great cities like New York, Vancouver, Tokyo and Shanghai, populations who had watched the travails of London and Sydney now made frantic preparations of their own.

Ten percent of humanity lived within ten meters of sea level, hundreds of millions of people. Now the risen sea, or the fear of it, was driving them away from their homes, a tremendous flight of population gathering all over the planet. But the images blurred after a time, one desolate stream of rain-soaked refugees looking much like another.

A tagline reported the plight of the Newcastle football team, trapped in Mumbai after losing the Cup Final. And the news flicked out as Benj cycled through the channels. At last he settled on a kids’ channel, showing a gory cartoon.

Lily had just got the rice boiled when the power failed again. Both the kids groaned in frustration as the TV died. Lily hastily poured the last of the boiling water into another thermos, and shoveled in instant coffee after it.

Early that afternoon Piers Michaelmas came calling for Lily. He knocked on the door, standing there in battle dress. He refused a coffee from the thermoses.

He was here, he said, to take her on a boat ride into the heart of London. “Sorry I couldn’t call. Blessed phones, you know what it’s like. Here.” He handed her a mil-issue satellite phone. “For future contingencies.”

“So what’s this trip about?”

“Call it old times’ sake.”

So she lodged the kids with a neighbor, and put on her blue AxysCorp coverall. They walked briskly down the street, past the bowser, to the shoreline where the road was submerged. Here a Marine waited for them in an inflatable orange boat tied up to a lamp post. The Marine helped Lily and Michaelmas into the boat, and made her put on a life jacket and a light face mask.

Then he pushed the boat away and started a small motor, and the boat drilled straight down the line of the drowned street toward the old riverbank. Lily found the face mask confining, it was like a surgeon’s theater mask, but given the rising stink of the river and the unidentifiable lumps that floated in the water, she was glad of it.

She watched the Marine check his position on a GPS sleeve patch. He had a kind of miniaturized sounder set up in the boat at his side, and he peered suspiciously at every shadow in the water as they passed. “Tricky navigation,” she said.

“It is that, miss,” he said ruefully. He was grizzled, his skin leathery, though he looked no older than forty. His accent was robust Scottish.

“Don’t be modest,” Piers said. “Harry’s always been a bit of a sailor, is what I hear.”

“Aye, that’s true. I grew up on Skye, you know. But this is different. After all, nobody’s sailed down the Fulham Road before, that I know of. It’s full of obstacles, traffic cones and cars and rubbish. I can’t see a thing in this murk, so thank Jim for this sounding stuff.” The safest course, it seemed, was to make your way down the center of the submerged roads, or better yet to seek out the old river itself, where you could be reasonably sure of clear water beneath your keel.

They reached the Thames a little way upstream from Putney Bridge. There was low clearance under the bridge’s arches, enough for this dinghy but not for anything much more substantial. Indeed one expensive-looking cabin cruiser was stuck fast. The current was quite strong, the murky water turbulent and smelling faintly of rot and sewage. Lily saw a cloud of mosquitoes, a new arrival in a transformed city.

From the river the old banks were quite invisible. The river had become broad, the flooding spreading as much as a kilometer inland. Houses, schools, churches, industrial developments all poked out of the muddy water, isthmuses of brick and concrete and steel and glass. An elevated section of road soared, a bridge going nowhere, cars stranded motionless on their backs. The remaining population clung to bits of higher ground, islands rising out of the water. Lily saw kids waving from one, and a helicopter perched in a school playing field on another. The Thames valley was turning into an archipelago.

Piers showed her a sketch map based on satellite imagery of the latest version of the river’s course. “You can see the floodwaters have gathered in these ‘embayments.’ Independent hydrological units, I’m being trained to call them.” The embayments were lagoons, sudden, spectacular features in themselves, some kilometers long, bearing the names of the areas they covered: Hammersmith, Westminster, Bermondsey, Isle of Dogs, Greenwich. “They’re virtually cut off from each other by necks of high land, though there are tunnels and sewers and so forth that connect them. The good news is that flooding in one area doesn’t necessarily imply flooding elsewhere. The bad news is you have to pump them all dry, they won’t drain naturally…”

Under Wandsworth Bridge, they saw a copper restraining a bunch of youths from going for a swim. The Marine tutted and shook his head. “Soon as the sun’s out people want to go paddling, even with the floating corpses and the turds and that.”

“Civilians, eh, Harry?” Piers said. “But you can’t blame them. A lot of people are playing around. You know, you can take a motorboat ride into Westminster Hall. I’m told that’s been flooding since the thirteenth century. Or a gondola trip around Soho. And in the City the whizz-kid types are water-skiing around the skyscrapers.”

Lily studied him.“You seem very sanguine, Piers. I don’t want to pick at old wounds, but you weren’t a particularly relaxed character back in Barcelona.”

He stiffened a bit, but smiled. “Well, so the shrinks keep telling me whenever they get their hands on me. But it’s just so good to be out, isn’t it? That’s what’s starting to sink in, I think. Even though we’ve been plunged into crisis the moment we stepped out of the wretched AxysCorp chopper.”

She knew he was divorced, without children, and had no family to visit, no real home to go back to. Before his abduction he had been a senior figure in military and diplomatic circles; that was why he had been attempting his peace-brokering in Spain in the first place. Now, after his strange, brave, demon-exorcising adventure on the Isle of Dogs, which he had told her all about, he seemed ready to engage with his own world again, and she was glad to see him functioning.

“As regards the flooding,” he said now,“we’re moving into a different phase. The long term. Tough decisions have to be made, and followed through. And that’s what I’m beginning to wrap my puny brain around. Rather therapeutic, I’m finding it.”

As they talked they passed beneath more of the bridges of London. As they neared the Chelsea Bridge she could already see the towers of Battersea Power Station looming defiantly above the water.