Stephen Baxter - Flood

“We’re both alone.”

It seemed to take an enormous amount of courage for him to cover her hand with his. “We may never love each other. We may never have kids. God, it’s hard to think of a worse time to have kids. But-” He wouldn’t meet her eyes.

She thought she understood what had brought this on. As Nathan understood in his own way, the pressure of the flood had become such that everybody was in flux, there was no certainty. Piers’s own advice of only three years ago-that they should all move back to Britain-was now proven to be wrong-headed. That was why Nathan was relocating his core functions and staff to an enclave in the Andes. That was why the hostages were having this conversation now.

And that was why Piers had made this strange declaration. To him, refuge wasn’t so much a place to be. To Piers, Lily herself was his haven, as perhaps she had been in Barcelona.

To mock Piers now would be fatal, terminal. She had to be honest, straightforward.

“Yes,” she said.

Piers looked at her, surprised. “Yes?”

“Yes. I’ll be with you.”

“That’s settled, then,” Gary said, sounding pleased. “Good.”

Piers blew out his cheeks, his face reddening.

“So what about you, Gary?” Lily asked. “You coming to make up the quorum?”

“I got something else to do first,” Gary said.“I mentioned unfinished business. I had a message from Michael Thurley. You remember, the Foreign Office guy?”

Lily frowned. “I’ve heard nothing from him since Helen was killed.”

“Well, he’s still working on the case, still trying to track down Grace. To their credit, the British government kept up pressure on the Saudis, while they had a lot of other things on their minds.”

Piers nodded. “Good old HMG. So what’s happened now?”

“Said has been on the run for two years, since the coup. In the end he exchanged Grace in return for a safe haven, somewhere in the Rockies. And meanwhile Grace has been handed over to Thurley, who’s in Denver, where the State Department is operating out of now.”

“So Michael Thurley has Grace, at last.” Lily shook her head.“I don’t believe it. Poor Helen! She never saw her baby again.”

“But Thurley doesn’t know what to do with her. And she’s not ‘baby Grace’ anymore; she’s five years old. So Thurley contacted me. Here’s my plan. I need to finish up my commitments here. Then I’ll go to Denver to meet Thurley and Grace, and I’ll bring Grace to Project City, and meet up with you guys.”

Piers grunted. “Gary, don’t leave it too late. It may not be possible to make that kind of journey much longer.”

Gary nodded seriously.“I hear what you say.” He glanced at his watch. “If we’re done we ought to shut down, this link is costing Nathan a small fortune. You know, I can’t remember the last time we were together in person-all of us survivors.”

Lily said,“Once we couldn’t get away from each other, now we can’t meet.”

“We will,” Gary said. “Look after yourselves.”

“And you look after Grace.”

He reached over, his hand disappearing out of sight of the projection system, and his image dissipated.

Lily and Piers were left standing side by side.

“Well,” she said. “Suddenly this is awkward.”

“Oh, if you’re going to be an idiot about it I’m taking a walk.”

“Have a drink with me first-”

There was a boom, like an artillery piece firing. Both Lily and Piers ducked reflexively.

They turned to the window, where the sunset was fading. A billowing cloud rose up from some part of the abandoned city, far away. Maybe it was a building falling, Lily thought. Or maybe not. As the noise echoed from the flat concrete walls the pigeons took flight, rising from their nests in windowless rooms that had once been occupied by lawyers and web designers and public relations representatives, lifting up in a great gathering flock that darkened the towering red sky.

Mean sea-level rise above 2010 datum: 200-800m

February 2025

Lily decided to talk to Amanda about Kristie. She was surprised when Piers insisted on accompanying her.

He was waiting for her at noon, when she emerged from her AxysCorp office just off the Plaza de Armas at the heart of Cusco. Piers kept his AxysCorp durable-wear coverall crisply laundered and ironed, so it had the look of the military uniforms he had discarded five years ago, when he had first come to work for Nathan and they had moved to Project City. He was forty-nine now, as she was, graying, his face gaunt, his posture so erect that his shadow under the blue Peruvian sky was like a sundial. He still had that air of brittleness about him, she thought. Like a dried-up cane ready to snap in the breeze, as Michael Thurley had observed all those years ago. Yet he survived.

“I’m not sure why you’re coming,” Lily said. “This is a family matter.”

He stiffened a bit. “Ah. And there was me thinking we are family now.”

In the five years they had lived together she had kept learning that he was extraordinarily easy to hurt.“I don’t mean that. But this is sister stuff. A mother and a daughter, an aunt and a niece. Amanda hasn’t spoken to Kristie for six months, not since Kristie headed off for the Titicaca commune.”

“Or alternatively,” Piers said, “not since Amanda moved in with Juan Villegas.”

“Well, there you go,” she said. “There are two sides to every story, aren’t there? All I want is for my sister and my niece to start talking to each other again. And if you go implying that this is all somehow Amanda’s fault then you won’t be helping.”

“But it is Amanda’s fault, as you put it. Through her own vanity she has taken up with this man and driven her daughter away.”

“Piers, Kristie’s twenty years old. She’s entitled to make her own decisions. I mean, what were you doing when you were twenty? Not living with your mother, I’ll bet.”

He shook his head. “That’s irrelevant. These are not normal times-things are not as they were. The old rules don’t apply.”

“Hm,” she said. “Look-just leave Amanda to me. All right?”

But Piers stayed silent, making no such commitment. He smiled at her, and offered her his arm.

They set off to walk to Amanda’s-or rather to the house of Juan Villegas, the criollo Lily’s sister had moved in with. You walked everywhere in Project City, or you rode a bicycle or maybe a horse if you could get hold of one. Even Nathan Lammockson walked. There wasn’t the fuel to spare for non-essentials.

They crossed the expanse of the Plaza. This was Cusco, once the capital of the Inca empire, later a Spanish colonial city, and in the twentieth century a tourist haven. Now Cusco was the center of Nathan Lammockson’s Project City, his high-altitude enclave. But this sprawling square of paving and floral displays and streetlights remained the heart of the city, just as when it had been the center of a continent-sized empire the Incas had called Tahuantinsuyo, the Four Quarters of the Earth. They passed colonial churches full of vivid imagery in blood and gold, and climbed steep streets crowded with people in AxysCorp work suits, but also with locals, some of them Amerinds in bowler hats and ponchos. One woman pushed a huge barrow-load of yas. When she had first come to work for Nathan here, Lily had soon realized that despite his vast reengineering of the city and its environs-diverting the trans-Andean water pipeline that had once supplied Lima, for instance-Lammockson’s vision, or madness, could never overwhelm the essential character of this place, any more than had the ideological drive of the conquering Spaniards, who, unable to demolish the Inca city, had built their own town on its monumental foundations.