Stephen Baxter - Flood

Nobody chose to stay in the main house, though they would use its facilities, like the showers and laundry room. Instead the dozen of them settled for a cluster of the little single-story chalets under the shelter of the spruce trees. They were close enough together that in the shared yard outside they could build their evening hearth, an important ritual.

Gary doubled up with Sanjay. Sanjay, exhausted from his traveling, dumped his rucksack, kicked off his boots, threw himself on a bunk, and slept. Some of the Americans, stiff from the drive, started an improvised game of softball in the shade of the pines.

Gary went to find Thandie and, on a mischievous whim, Elena, and suggested exploring the village. The women eyed each other warily, but went along.

Surrounded by forest-clad peaks, Krasnaya Polyana was a pretty place, and at six hundred meters above the old sea-level datum was much too high to have been touched by the floods. It was good to walk briskly, and to breathe in air unpolluted by smoke or sewage. Gary could see why Putin had liked it-a man with taste, he thought. In fact it was probably better for the casual traveler now that twenty-first-century tourism had receded, so long as you didn’t get shot by some Russian brand of survivalist.

They found paths that led to an arboretum, and to the remains of a hunting lodge that had to predate Putin, and indeed modern Russia; maybe it belonged to the tsars. And beyond that they came to a river valley, where a threadlike waterfall tumbled into a plunge pool.

Thandie glanced around. There was nobody in sight. “Fuck it.” She ran toward the water, whooping, stripping off her clothes as she ran. She hopped as she got her jeans off. She was naked by the time she got to the water, her brown body lithe and muscular, and she splashed into the pool.

“Watch your feet on the rocks!” Elena called after her. “And the water will be cold-”

“Elena.” Gary touched her arm. “Lighten up. Come on.” He unzipped his own coverall.

“Very well. But no peeking.”

Gary stripped bare. Elena kept her underwear on, sensible stuff, heavy pants and a kind of sports bra. She was bustier than she had looked with her blouse on.

By now Thandie was splashing about under the waterfall. Her crisp hair sparkled with water droplets. The water was cold enough to make Gary hop and squeal as he went in centimeter by centimeter. Thandie kicked spray at him. “You classic wimp.”

“Oh, shut up. Christ, Thandie, you must have rubber skin.”

Elena slid uncomplaining into the water. It was just about deep enough to swim, to float your body off the rocks. Elena took a few solemn breaststrokes, her unsmiling face staring straight ahead.

The three of them gathered in a circle. Once you got used to the water the cold wasn’t so bad, and the contrast with the warmth of the air was refreshing. Gary did his best to keep his eyes away from Thandie’s bare body, and from Elena, whose underwear, soaked, didn’t conceal much.

As for the women, Gary knew he was no hunk, but he had thought they’d peek. But they seemed to be working harder at not looking at each other than not looking at him. Aha, he thought. Maybe that was why there was so much tension between them.

Elena said to Gary, “I suppose you must have dreamed of places like this, during your captivity.”

“You bet.”

“Forgive me for asking. I have known you for some time, but I do not know you well. We have not spoken of your captivity before.”

“That’s OK. Most people are embarrassed to mention it, I think.”

“How long were you kept?”

“In all, three years.”

“I am shocked.”

“The others got me through. The worst times weren’t the rough stuff, the humiliations and the beatings. Or a habit they had in one of our holding centers where they would throw us our food and make us scrabble for it, like apes. The worst time was when I was kept alone.”

Elena nodded. “We are social creatures. We are defined by our relationships with others. Without that-”

“We’re nothing.” He splashed water into his face. “I always knew there were good times like this ahead of me. That kept me going.”

Thandie said, “But there are no more good times for Helen Gray.”

“No. Poor Helen. I don’t suppose Lily has made any progress in finding out what became of her kid?”

“No. Though the child is still supposed to be in the continental US somewhere. Lily thinks she’s become a pawn in the latest complicated diplomatic games regarding the various factions in Saudi, and what’s going to become of their oil. Lily’s sticking at it. Actually I got to see Lily when I was sent to South America. She’s mostly working with AxysCorp in Peru. Something called Project City.”

“What the hell’s that?”

Thandie shrugged. “Who knows? Just another dumb idea of Nathan Lammockson’s.”

Elena turned to her.“You were in South America recently? How are things there?”

Gary said, “Maybe we should wait for the hearth…”

As the global flood event unfolded, the international band of climatologists, oceanographers, geologists, seismologists, hurricane-chasers and ecologists who traveled the globe gathering data and cooking up hypotheses had formed a community of their own. There weren’t all that many of them to begin with, they were broadly of a similar age and from similar academic backgrounds, and they kept bumping into each other.

With time the data-gathering and the face-to-face sharing of news added up to a kind of ongoing global workshop that came to seem increasingly important. The civilian population was too concerned with just getting through the challenges of the next twenty-four hours, and the governments with providing the essentials of life to a stressed population-and, perhaps, hanging onto their own power. It was only in the endless conversation of the itinerant scientists that a planetary consciousness of what was going on was maintained.

And the ritual of the hearths had emerged as a central part of the process. On nights like this, when a group felt it was quorate, you would sit around a camp fire, real or metaphorical, to drink, smoke, shoot up, make out-and, most important of all, you talked your heart out about what you had seen. Generally the sessions were transcribed by speech recognition systems and uploaded to what was left of the worldwide web, to provide an expert oral history of the flood.

But Thandie said,“Nah. When we do the hearth later, we can embellish. In the meantime I’m comfortable here.” She scissored her long legs in the crisp water. “You want to hear about South America or not?”

“Shoot,” said Gary.

“To begin with, the glaciers are vanishing in the Andes…”

Even as the seas rose, global warming was increasing faster than ever. An immediate consequence was that cities along the Pacific coast of South America that relied on glacier runoff for their drinking water were running dry as the glaciers vanished. Others too, in similar locations in North America and the foothills of the Himalayas, were going thirsty.

Meanwhile on South America’s east coast, Thandie said, there had been a major sea incursion at the broad mouth of Rio de la Plata. Coastal cities like Montevideo and Buenos Aires had long been drowned, but now the sea was pushing hundreds of kilometers northwards, flooding the lowlands of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. An even more dramatic incursion had forced its way into the mouths of the Amazon and back along the river valley, creating a giant inland sea. “Even where it isn’t drowned the rainforest is dying back,” Thandie said.“Just rotting away.”

“And so becoming another source of carbon dioxide, rather than our greatest land reservoir of carbon, as it should be,” Elena said. Her special-ism was global ecological cycles. “More greenhouse.”