Stephen Baxter - Flood

“Like I just jumped into a plunge pool.”

He laughed. “Ah, that’s Houston for you. Always been a tough environment, as hot as Calcutta, barely a human place at all. And, I must say, when I started working here I came down with a string of colds. My doctor said my immune system was weakened by the temperature swings. And how are Amanda and the kids?”

“Fine. Still in their caravan park outside Aylesbury. They still haven’t been allowed to go home to Fulham. The kids swim to school. I’m kidding! My own work’s going OK.”

“On this diving project, I suppose.”

“Just background stuff for now, mostly in England.”

They were driving toward downtown; the central skyscrapers loomed ahead. Houston seemed to be a mash-up of residential, industrial and retail developments. It looked rather dated, Lily thought, very 1960s. She saw sprinklers working away at lawns of tough-looking thick-bladed grass.

Piers’s manner and accent hadn’t changed at all, despite his immersion in Texas for so many months; he was still cool, ironic, officer-class British. But his eyes occasionally unfocused. He must have an Angel, or the latest mil-spec equivalent, speaking in his head; even in her company he remained separated, alone. But, clear-eyed, clean-shaven, his hair neatly cropped, he looked healthier than she’d ever known him.

“I can see you adapted, Piers. Nice shorts, by the way.”

He raised his eyebrows. “My shorts are serviceable and neat, thank you.”

“You’re enjoying life here, aren’t you?”

“Well, Americans are always welcoming. Houston’s a pretty diverse place, I think. There’s even an Iranian district now, quite remarkable. But the main thing I like is the room. Only an hour to the Gulf coast, only a day’s drive the other way to desert, or hills.. The work is the thing, of course. Having something meaningful to do makes a big difference to one’s morale, doesn’t it?”

“That it does. I saw the levees from the air.”

“They’re talking about a tidal barrier further out, a series of gates that would dwarf the Thames Barrier. Typical bloody Texans. But they do have a lot to protect. Most of the detailed work I’ve been doing has concerned Houston’s petroscape.”

The protection of the Gulf was a public and private project, a shared task of governments, oil companies and other multinationals. Piers was the leader of an exchange party from Britain, who were applying the lessons learned safing British oil facilities like Canvey Island to the much larger-scale problems here.

“You wouldn’t believe the size of it, Lily. This is the largest concentration of petrochemical refinery and storage facilities in the world. A hundred kilometers of tanks and cracking towers, stretching from Houston all the way to the coast.”

“And all of it threatened by the sea.”

“Quite,” he said mildly. “Galveston Island, for instance, rises only three meters or so above sea level-I mean above the old datum. Houston is even worse off. It was built on marshland in the first place, and there’s been subsidence because of the oil and water they’ve been pumping out of the ground here for so long. In some places the city is actually below the old sea level. Well, we know that the average global rise is already up to five meters. If the sea did break through-well.

“But immense as it is, this project is an incident in the bigger picture. You have to see that this is a global crisis, impacting a world already afflicted by climate change, energy shortages and ideological tensions. We are trying to save the hubs.”

“The hubs?”

“You’d be surprised how dependent our world-wide network of energy and material flows is on a few key nodes. Grain silos, power stations, oil sources and refineries.”

“Like Houston.”

“Like Houston. And of course an awful lot of these facilities are on the coasts, even on flood plains. So we’re trying to sustain that network as far as possible. In the short term it’s all about emergency measures. For instance we’re trying to make sure all the tanker fleets are kept at sea. Any manufacturing or processing facility we believe might be lost is being worked as hard as possible to produce durables for the transition period-that is, the transition until everything’s been moved inland or uphill, and is made safe against the floods. Bronze, stainless steel, plastic, that sort of thing, age-resistant. You should see the Goodyear plant.”

“Goodyear? The tires people?”

“They’ve been here for decades. Now they’re churning out mountains of the damn things.”

“Why do we need tires?”

“Rafts,” he said.

That simple word took her aback. She had had the sense with Piers since they had come out of Barcelona that he was much closer to the center than she was, that he knew far more than she did, that he looked that much further into the future.

The car slowed. They were southwest of downtown at an intersection of two major avenues, Montrose Street with Westheimer Road. She glimpsed galleries, cafes, restaurants, bars, shops. It was a lively area that Amanda would probably have called “counter-cultural.”

“This is the Montrose District,” Piers said. “One of the few walkable neighborhoods in the city. I thought you’d appreciate being here. Your hotel is just around the corner-there, you see? Look, I have to go back to work for a few hours. Sorry to abandon you for now.” He handed over her bag.

On impulse, she kissed him on the cheek. “Later then.”

“Sure.”

The car door opened, and Lily jumped out. Again she was struck by the sheer physical intensity of the sunlight that bounced off the sidewalk flags. There were few people around in the heat of the day.

Piers called from the car, “Oh, Lily-make sure you’re in your room at about midnight. I’m fixing up a conference call with some old friends. Call it my treat.”

“It’s a date.”

The car closed itself up and slid away. She hurried up the steps and through sliding doors into the hotel’s cool, dark interior.

Helen Gray and Michael Thurley took a late breakfast in the IAEA trailer they shared.

Then, still early in the morning, they prepared to take Piers’s conference call. They installed themselves in a bar close to the waterfront of Bushehr’s old port, and set up their laptops on a plastic table. The computers were battered relics of the noughties, all the International Atomic Energy Agency could afford. The heat was already gathering. But the open-fronted bar was used to western visitors, and was equipped with fans and plenty of iced water, and would be bearable for an hour or more yet.

While they waited for Lily to log on Helen sipped orange juice, and looked out at the Persian Gulf.

Bushehr was at the end of a long, flat island, once joined to the Iranian mainland by a tidal marsh; now it was cut off by the rising sea, and you got here by boat or aircraft. A battered cargo ship made its way toward the deep outer anchorage, probably stuffed with the dried fruits and raw cotton that were the principal exports of the region. Its gray form passed between rows of buildings. Looking inland Helen could make out the industrial hinterland of the old city, the food-processing and engineering facilities attracted here to serve the regional oil distribution center that was the town’s main function. There was a smell of spices, of oil, of hot metal, of thick coffee from inside the bar, and a muezzin call floated on the hot morning air.

And there, like a pale mushroom rising above the old port, was the containment dome of the nuclear power plant, the reason they had come here.

The laptop screens lit up. There was Lily sitting in what looked like a hotel room, and Amanda, her sister, in the cramped confines of a caravan or a mobile home. These were just still images. They had to wait a few more seconds for the links to be fully established; bandwidth wasn’t what it used to be. Helen and Michael had never met Amanda, but had got to know her online through Lily, like a member of an extended family.