Stephen Baxter - Flood

Helen murmured to Michael Thurley, “So this is it. No Gary, no Piers-even though Piers is supposed to have set up this online reunion in the first place.”

Michael said, “Well, Gary’s at the bottom of the bloody sea somewhere, so you can’t blame him. But as you say, Piers set it up. You’d think he could find half an hour to speak to us.”

“He did it for Lily. That’s what he says.”

“Surely for himself too.” Michael rubbed an unshaven chin. “I was brought up a Catholic, you know.” Actually she hadn’t known that about him. “We were quite a tight community, we Hampshire Catholics. Not many of us, for one thing. I lapsed at a young age, seventeen or so.” He smiled. “Not everybody in the church was as tolerant of my homosexuality, my ‘sin,’ as they might have been. But my mother continued to practice.

“A few years later my father died suddenly, and my mother said she had lost her faith. She stopped attending Mass. I found it rather upsetting. Although I had no intention of going back myself, I found it somehow comforting that she continued to practice. As if I had a route back. Well, she did go back for my sake, she made her confession and that was that. A good thing too. I think she found the church a comfort in the years before she died.”

“So maybe Piers is the same, you think. He won’t meet us, but it’s comforting for him to know that the rest of us still do.”

“Perhaps. But do any of us really understand each other? Why, I don’t even understand us.”

And nor did Helen, though she had had to try to explain her relationship with Michael to the IAEA inspectors and nuclear engineers, western, Russian and Iranian, who regularly hit on her. She was a single mother, Michael a homosexual in early middle age, and they were locked in a peculiar relationship: sexless, passionless-but not really platonic, it was more than that. They had come together in the trauma of the London flood, of course. Maybe they had found in each other something they needed, something each had lacked separately.

Or maybe, on some deeper, more cynical level, all she really cared about Michael was that he still represented the best chance she had of getting her child back.

Lily’s image jerked to life. “Are we on? Howdy from Texas.”

Amanda smiled, her face lighting up, and blew kisses.“Hello Bushehr, here are the votes from the Luxembourg jury.”

Helen and Michael waved back, feeling foolish, sitting in this empty bar waving at aging laptop screens.

They quickly established where and when they were: Lily in her hotel room in Houston at midnight, Amanda in a caravan in the Chilterns, not far from Aylesbury, where it was very early morning,“sitting on a hillside with a bunch of sheep and half the population of Chiswick,” and here were Helen and Michael outside an Iranian nuclear plant, some thousand kilometers south of Tehran.

Amanda said,“I don’t really understand why you’re there. Aren’t you looking for your baby, Helen? His father was Saudi, not Iranian. And I don’t know what you have to do with nuclear reactors…”

It was a complicated story. This reactor, built under contract by Russian engineers, was not long ago a pricking-point of world tension as a pivotal point of Iran’s uranium enrichment program. But Bushehr sat right on the Persian Gulf, and, like more than four hundred of the world’s nuclear facilities, was threatened by the rising sea. Not only that it was a lousy piece of engineering, full of design flaws eradicated from most plants since Three Mile Island. The IAEA team were rushing to work with the Iranians to decommission it before the sea had a chance to overwhelm it.

“Naturally HMG is supporting that effort,” Michael said.“I managed to get myself assigned to our small diplomatic team. All an excuse to stay close to the trail of baby Grace, you see.”

Grace had disappeared into the complicated clutches of Said’s branch of the Saudi royal family. One patriarchal figure in that branch, however, a distant cousin of the Saudi king, was more of a realist than the rest, and had appeared to offer compromises. This man had been swept up by the global crisis, as had everybody else, and had been sent to Iran as part of a Saudi inspection party. The Saudis needed a presence here because any fallout from Bushehr would have threatened the whole of the Gulf downwind, including Kuwait, Dubai and Saudi itself.

Michael had got himself attached to this mission in the hope of making contact with this helpful Saudi prince. “But progress is slow,” he admitted.

Helen thought that was an understatement.

Amanda shifted in her chair. “Well, we couldn’t get much further from the coast, and just as well. There’s something I want to show you.” She tapped at an out-of-shot keyboard. “I’ll see if I can download it. It’s a map they published yesterday. I wish Benj was up, he’s the one who’s good at this stuff, but he won’t be awake for another six hours minimum… Here we are.”

Down came an image of Great Britain, as the country had been transformed by the flooding, a composite of hundreds of satellite photographs. Helen quickly found that it was interactive; you could touch the screen and it would allow you to zoom and pan, and overlay town names and roads. They played with this for a while, discussing what they saw.

The map was strikingly different. The Thames estuary had broadened to a bay that swamped the marshes of Essex and North Kent. The beaches of the south coast resorts had vanished. In Somerset the sea had swamped the marshes and peat moors, and lapped around Glastonbury Tor. In East Anglia the Fens’ ancient drainage systems had been overwhelmed, and the sea had pushed inland for sixty kilometers or more, through Peterborough to form a new shore at Cambridge. In the north the Humber estuary now snaked into an inland sea that covered what had been low-lying Yorkshire farmland. In the west the Lancashire coastline from Liverpool up to Lancaster was submerged; the city of Liverpool itself had been all but abandoned.

Helen felt oddly dislocated. Her years in Barcelona had jolted her out of her lifelong habit of taking in information through screens. She had to remind herself that this was real, that the sea really was taking these big bites out of Britain, that this was the changing country Grace would come home to, someday.

Amanda was talking of her life in the caravan park. Even now, though the worst of last year’s storm-driven London floods had receded, the resources hadn’t been found to repair the abandoned housing stock in Fulham and Chiswick and Hammersmith and elsewhere. “These caravans are putting down roots. We’ve got mains, electricity and water! But it drives me crazy, it’s so small, I don’t have three quarters of my stuff…” Helen sensed that under her sparky talk Amanda found the thought that she might never be allowed back home, never able to rebuild and repair, disturbing on some fundamental level.

In the meantime life in Britain was changing in more subtle ways. Transport was more difficult, with washed-out road and rail links and the steadily increasing cost of fuel, and this was forcing a profound adjustment on everybody. Amanda’s kids were going to local Buckinghamshire schools, crowded with London refugees who were picked on by the locals. Amanda still commuted daily into her job in London, but she made the last leg on a riverboat that sailed past drowned river-front flats. She did her shopping in a Waitrose or a Tesco’s in Aylesbury, going in and out by bus, but what you could buy in the supermarkets changed daily as their supply and distribution chains broke down. Small independent stores were making a comeback, in fact, boasting fresh local sources.

“Everything is sort of stretched out of shape,” Amanda said stoically. “I sometimes think it’s as if we’re regressing to the past. Local schools, jobs, food. But things are still working, just.”