Stephen Baxter - Flood

“That’s the idea.”

“Did Mum send you?”

“No.” Lily pulled a face. “In fact she accused me of interfering.”

“Well, you are.”

“We can’t afford to fall out, the family. Kris is finding her own life, and that’s fine, that’s what she must do. But in the end we’re all we have, each other.”

“But for you, ‘we’ means more than family,” Benj said. “You have your friends-the hostages. You’re always drawn to them.”

“I see them as family too,” she said. “You know that.”

“Yes. But I wonder if Kristie feels-I don’t know-that the others get in the way.”

She frowned, wondering if he was trying to tell her something. “There’s a problem with Piers? Is that what you’re saying?”

He shook his head.“I’m just not sure what you’re going to find inside Kris’s head, when-” A screen embedded in his suit sleeve flashed pink; he tapped it and looked at a bit of scrolling text. “I need to go. Trouble in another bit of P-ville-another experimental field.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“No. You go catch your flight with Nathan. Give Kris my love. Tell her I agree with you that she should call Mum, which will probably make her even more determined to do the exact opposite. And tell that Quechua chap she’s with, Ollantay, that he owes me a glass of chicha.”

“I will.”

“Got to run.” And with that he detailed one of the cops to escort her out of P-ville, and he was gone into the shantytown’s winding streets.

In Nathan’s plane, Lily was lifted into the sky above Cusco.

She looked down at the old town, with its domes, cupolas and bell towers pushing out of a sea of red-tiled roofs. Beyond the fortified fence that circled the whole city she saw the brown smear of the shantytown, and the belt of agricultural land beyond, with its rough walls, banks of poplar trees, bright yellow fields, and dark scattered dots that were cows and llamas patiently feeding. Further out still, the dome of the spanking new nuclear reactor shone brightly in the sun.

But as she rose higher yet the town nestling in its basin was lost in the detail of a crumpled landscape of peaks and table mountains, draped with low cloudlike puffs of smoke. This was the Andes, a mountain range second only in scale and extent to the Himalayas, its grandeur unconquered by the flood. As they crossed the sierra they flew over a quilt of cultivation, neat fields of barley and maize with walls of tall eucalyptus and prickly-pear cacti. This high ground had first been terraced and farmed by the Incas six hundred years ago, and was still worked today, with crops of potatoes, and with herds of llamas and alpacas loping freely.

But peering east she thought she could see the sea of cloud that covered the new Amazonian ocean, a rainforest now submerged and rotting under a salt sea only a few years old.

Piers Michaelmas sat ahead of Lily. She could see the back of his head, the precisely shaven hair as he sat bolt upright in his seat. He had decided he was coming along with Lily to “sort this out,” as he put it, and she hadn’t been able to find a way to talk him out of it.

“Amazing what the Incas did up here,” Nathan murmured. Sitting next to Lily, he looked over her shoulder. “I mean, their empire lasted only a few decades. But the Incas built fast and big, and left a mark. Just like the Romans.”

“And just like you, Nathan?”

“Oh, don’t push your luck, Brooke. Yes, like me. Some of us have a gaze that pierces centuries. I think that was a phrase of Churchill’s.” He gazed out at his domain, and the brilliant sunlight of the high air silhouetted his fleshy face.

The plane landed, businesslike, near the shore of Titicaca, on the outskirts of an ugly, functional town called Puno, once a base for silver mining and now the administrative capital of the altiplano. Lily and Piers clambered down under a sky of even deeper blue.

The lake water was calm today, turquoise and flat, stretching away. The light of the descending sun caught the yellow of the reed beds. On the horizon Lily saw a serration of glaciated peaks, and clouds bubbled up from the lower ground, cumulus clouds created below this body of water. It was a sight she always found astonishing, a whole lake seven hundred kilometers long complete with islands and fishing boats, suspended three kilometers up in the sky. But even here refugees had drifted. Even here there was a kind of fringe shantytown around the shore, people squatting in crude huts of reed or overturned boats, living on the fish they caught, or the potatoes that they grew on scrubby patches of cleared ground-and, perhaps, there was a little alpaca rustling going on.

Nathan stretched his legs for five minutes, and then got back aboard his plane with Villegas and his people, and took off for his confrontation with the intrusive British in their aircraft carrier. A few minutes later a company car arrived for Piers and Lily, a dawdling cell-powered buggy.

The last known location of Kristie Caistor was on the Islas de los Uros. The car took them to the place on the shore where they had to catch a boat to get to the islands themselves, another AxysCorp vessel with the planet-cradling corporate logo plastered to its hull.

The “islands” were artificial, just mats of reeds. On the largest was a kind of village of neat-looking huts of reed. Rowing boats were pulled up on the island’s soggy littoral. There was a faint smell of rot, and a stronger stink of the fish that hung on lines in rows, drying in the afternoon sun. AxysCorp’s modern plastic-hulled boat looked entirely alien.

Kristie stood on her island home waiting for her aunt. Twenty years old, deeply tanned, she wore a tunic of brightly dyed wool and a black bowler hat. A young man stood beside her, shorter than she was, his skin a deep brown, his eyes black, wearing similarly colorful woolen clothes. Like Benj, Kristie was much changed from her Fulham days. But Fulham was vanished now, a name nobody need ever speak again; this was the reality, this eyrie lake, and this was what Kristie had become.

As the boat drew in Kristie ran forward. “Hi, Lily! Let me help you. It’s a bit tricky to cross until you get used to it.”

She was right. It was awkward to step from the bobbing boat onto the island, where the reeds gave way under Lily’s feet, making the footing uncertain. Lily had a flashback to when she had clambered aboard the Trieste with Thandie Jones, all of eight years ago.

Piers followed, impatiently refusing help. Despite his insistence on coming along, he looked deeply unhappy to be here.

Kristie’s young man held out a hand.“So you are Aunt Lily. Come, let me show you our home. We don’t get many visitors!” His English was good, with the trace accent she remembered.

“Ollantay, isn’t it?” Lily said. “We did meet once, in Cusco.”

He looked at her, his eyes empty, his smile faint.“ Qosqo,” he said.“We call it Qosqo. Closer to the true Inca pronunciation.”

“The town’s name,” Piers said stiffly,“isn’t Qosqo or Cusco but Project City.”

Ollantay turned to him, his bland smile unchanging. They shook hands, but Piers’s expression was hostile.

They walked to a shack, bundles of reed heaped up for walls with more reeds spread in a rough thatch over a roof of corrugated iron. Birds had evidently been nesting in the thatch, and a small satellite dish sat on the roof.

Inside, the space was surprisingly roomy and clean, with blankets hanging on the walls, and a kind of woolen carpet spread over the floor. There were boxes and trunks, and nods to modernity like nylon sleeping bags rolled up in one corner. Lily saw traces of Kristie’s old identity: the handheld computer on which she’d once done her homework and compiled her scrapbook, her old pink backpack hanging from one wall, even her battered teddy bear stuck in a corner. And Lily smelled cooking, roast meat. She suspected it was guinea pig.