Stephen Baxter - Flood

Lily sympathized about the caravan. “I can imagine you and the kids crammed in there. I expect I’ll have more room in Gary’s submarine.”

The talk turned to that, the nature of the dive, the dangers, its purposes.

Lily said, “Gary, Thandie and their crew simply don’t believe the UN’s assurances about the limits to the sea-level rise.”

Amanda snorted. “Never mind the scientists. Just ask Benj and Kristie. There’s endless online chatter about it all. You have Aussie kids who watched Bondi Beach disappear, Inuit kids watching the permafrost drown in the Arctic-and a lot of them measuring what’s going on in some way, even if it’s only chalk marks on a pier. Kristie’s keeping up her scrapbook of this stuff-do you remember that project, Lily? I mean they’re all just kids, but kids aren’t necessarily stupid, my kids certainly aren’t, and they’re telling each other what they see. And they all agree that the rise is real, and in fact it’s accelerating. So, Lily, you don’t need to go diving at all. Not unless it’s just an excuse to get up close and personal with that astronaut.”

“Gordo, you mean-”

“That’s what I’ve been telling her too,” came a new voice.

In her screen image, Lily looked up, startled. “Oh, hi, Piers.” Helen saw Lily shove sideways to let him sit beside her; they seemed to be on the edge of her hotel room bed.

Helen and Michael exchanged a glance. So Piers had made it after all.

“Looking good, Piers,” Helen said. “Texas cooking agrees with you.”

Piers smiled, but it was a strained expression, and his eyes looked dark. Helen remembered it was past midnight for him, and he’d clearly been working hard. He turned to Lily. ‘Gordo.’ You name-dropper.”

“He’s taking me on a personal tour of Johnson tomorrow. How cool is that?”

“Well, it’s good that you should see the space center before it becomes a museum.”

Piers’s tone startled Helen. He was right, of course. Despite heroic efforts Cape Canaveral was under severe threat; from space Florida looked as if it had been cut in half by the ocean. But the remark was cynical for Piers, and personal, even cruel. One of the many secrets they had learned about Lily in Barcelona was that Lily had joined the USAF, despite being raised in Britain, in the faint hope of making it into NASA; this was an old dream for her, now flung back at her by Piers. Perhaps he was tired. Or, just maybe, there was some small grain of jealousy lodged in his soul.

Lily, however, didn’t react.

Piers said now, “Just a minute.” He reached forward and tapped at an invisible keyboard.

The laptop images blinked, then recovered, but the picture quality was poorer, the sound scratchier.

Amanda asked, “What was that? Something on the fritz?”

“No. I put us through a military encryption filter; we’re reasonably secure now. Look, I overheard the last bit of your talk. I want to give you some advice, all of you. This theorizing about the sea-level rise is actually irrelevant. Whatever happens to the ocean, in future things are likely to get a good deal more difficult.”

“ ‘Difficult,’ ” said Michael.

“Yes, difficult. I talked over some of the bigger picture with Lily earlier. We’re already seeing petty wars triggered by refugee flows and shortages of fresh water and dry land, new pressures exacerbating old tensions. At present it’s the usual flashpoints that are kicking off, India versus Pakistan for instance-though that conflict’s largely overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the deltas. But nowhere will be immune, ultimately.”

His dry, laconic way of speaking was oddly chilling. Helen wondered what briefings might lie behind his words. “So what’s your advice, Piers?”

“To go home. Back to Britain, as soon as you can. Look-Britain is under pressure, from the loss of farmland, the flooding of London and the other cities. And we’re still heavily reliant on imported food and energy sources. But the fact is Britain is an island, and that gives us a certain natural security. It always has. The government is beginning a crash program of resilience, of securing food and energy supplies without a reliance on foreign imports-I mean, we have coal, North Sea gas and oil, nuclear. Even in some of the worst-case climate change scenarios Britain fares reasonably well. A Gulf Stream collapse, a cooling of the north Atlantic, might be balanced by a general warming of the Arctic.”

“We should retreat to Fortress Britain,” Lily said. “While the rest of the world drowns.”

“Well, just think about it. You did want us to stick together, Lily. What else can I do but give you my best advice?”

Lily said,“I appreciate it, Piers, but you’re not going to put me off my dives. There’s no scientific consensus about the sea-level rise. Don’t you think it’s worth a few submarine jaunts to try and find out?”

“The correct question is, is it worth losing your life?” He looked at her steadily. “I’m actually concerned for your safety, Lily, believe it or not.”

She reached across and grabbed his hand. “I know. But I have to go. Because if I don’t, who’s going to look after Gary?”

He laughed. Then he pulled his hand away, withdrawing into himself again. He stood up. “I need to get back to work.”

Helen frowned. “You can’t be serious. You’re exhausted.”

Piers smiled, ducking so the others could see his face in their screens. “I’m fine. Good night, all.”

“Good night and good morning, Piers,” Amanda said.

When he’d gone, Michael shook his head. “He’s wearing shorts and no tie, but nothing has changed about him. I’ve said it since the first time I met him. One of these days that man is going to snap like a dried twig.”

Lily snorted, and stretched.“Well, he’s not talking me out of my submarine trip. And I’m not done chatting yet, the night is young. What say we have a coffee break? I’ll see if I can get this lousy military filter off the link.”

They agreed, and broke up. Lily filled the screens with a silly saver image, some relic of her childhood perhaps, a puppet aqua-girl with long blond hair and webbed feet who swam past to a soppy crooning song.

But Helen’s phone sounded with a news flash. A nuclear warhead being hastily moved from a flood-threatened missile facility on the north German plain had been involved in a high-speed vehicle pileup. The warhead had partially detonated; Hamburg had been declared a disaster zone, and the German government was appealing for aid.

June 2017

From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

Mrs. Reese Shelby of Belle Glade, Florida, used her blog to protest at the state’s use of school buses to ship low-category prisoners from flood-threatened correctional facilities to safer institutions upstate.

“It’s not just that my kids have to tramp their way to school through the pouring rain, that’s not what I object to. And it’s not even that the governor has put the safety of thieves, murderers and rapists ahead of the safety of decent people. No, what I object to is the state these convicts leave the buses in. The seats are vandalized, they scrawl the most obscene graffiti, and there are bodily fluids everywhere…”

Mrs. Shelby went on to protest about the government decision to open up selected national parks to refugees from flooded areas.

October 2017

Nathan Lammockson had Lily flown into Keflavik airport, thirty kilometers west of Reykjavik.

An AxysCorp car met her there and drove her, not into the city itself, but inland, across desolate country. She glimpsed mountains, ice-crested. She was curious about this strange island; it was the first time she had visited. But she had no time to explore. Now that Lammockson had got hold of his bathyscaphe it was full speed ahead with his ocean survey project, and Lily was suddenly pitched into a whole new phase of her life. Lily Brooke, submarine pilot: who’d have thought it?